Arch Linux

Bob Day

Member

Registered: 2005-11-26

Posts: 43

[idea] Let pacman list installed packages that are flagged out-of-date

Wouldn't it be a nice idea if pacman could generate a list of installed packages that are flagged out-of-date in the repositories?
I can think about a few situations where this can be very handy for both users as for package maintainers.

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,641

Re: [idea] Let pacman list installed packages that are flagged out-of-date

maybe that could be done by the webinterface but that's not a task for pacman. pacman is for handling package installation. let's stay KISS.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: [idea] Let pacman list installed packages that are flagged out-of-date

would be pretty difficult to implement, probably best setup as an external tool. Try writing a script.

Mr Green

Forum Fellow

From: U.K.

Registered: 2003-12-21

Posts: 5,899

Website

Re: [idea] Let pacman list installed packages that are flagged out-of-date

Would getting all pacman tools together be a good thing ....

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Mr Green

toofishes

Developer

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-06-06

Posts: 602

Website

Re: [idea] Let pacman list installed packages that are flagged out-of-date

Would getting all pacman tools together be a good thing ....

Sure, but that doesn't mean all pacman tools have to be called from 'pacman'. Unix programming philosophy- each program should do one task well, not a bunch of tasks halfway well. This is definitely something for the web interface more than anything, and some kind of external script if you really want to do it for the console.

STiAT

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2004-12-23

Posts: 606

Re: [idea] Let pacman list installed packages that are flagged out-of-date

I also think that's a job for a tool.

If i remember correctly the url to a package in AUR was

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/<pkgname>/<pkgname>.tar.gz

Therefore it should not be much of a problem checking if a package exists, downlaod it, and invoke makepkg.

If you implement a search function, http://aur.archlinux.org/packages has directory list activated, so you also can build a "package db" out of this...
Of course, it takes time, reading packages, pkgbuilds, versions etc, since i don't think there is a public interface provided (xml / SOAP), but a pacman-like implementation for "aurman" would be possible by using the infrastructure given.

That would be a nice feature in between, a possibility to fetch the aur database (searching etc) using SOAP or similar technologies .... and quite simple to implement server-side. That would make it easy to build a AUR tool....

// STi

Last edited by STiAT (2007-03-14 14:40:42)

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