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Is there a utility for Arch that provides some power-features for analyzing the list of pending updates?

Usually, anytime I do pacman -Syu I get a rather large list of packages with pending updates. With AUR packages added to it, it is even worse. There does not appear to be an easy way to differentiate dependencies and libraries from actual software I requested (unless I happen to have memorized the package). It is also not easy to tell which packages are major version upgrades and which ones are minor. pamac from Manjaro provides a table which is a bit more legible, but still no way to easily see only updates to explicitly installed packages, or only major updates.

It seems like it would be relatively easy to parse pacman output and provide a sortable and filterable list of pending updates so that one can see at a glance whether certain important software is impacted by a given update, and how much. Does such a tool exist already?

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No, there is no such utility.

Further, it would not provide any benefit, real or perceived.

Any full system update (pacman -Syu), will pull the packages that you have installed in addition to all of the required dependencies. Even if pacman were to print out each category, it would make no difference; you are still required to install all of them, otherwise it is a partial update, and then you do run the very real risk of breakage.

The entire point of a rolling release is to trust the packagers to update packages in a timely fashion, ensure that all of the dependencies are similarly updated and--in the case of critical packages--release those into [testing] so that they can be signed off before being migrated into the standard repos.

Just update regularly so that all of the changes are in small, manageable increments.

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