How to see which pacman updates are major?

Question

I like to keep track of what's on my system and what is getting updated. However, there's a lot of tiny updates, e.g. gedit 3.6.2-1 to 3.6.2-2 that I don't want to think too much about.

Is there a simple way to make pacman highlight major updates, e.g. changes to the first or second segments in the version number? (Of course I realise that such a heuristic isn't very useful, but this seems like a problem that someone would have solved already.)

Here is an example with a lot of tiny updates:

automake            1.12.5-1      1.12.6-1     0.00 MiB                 
bison               2.6.5-1       2.7-1        0.03 MiB                 
cdrtools            3.01a09-1     3.01a10-1    0.00 MiB                 
cifs-utils          5.7-1         5.8-1        0.00 MiB                 
icu                 50.1-2        50.1.1-1     -0.04 MiB                
isl                 0.11-1        0.11.1-1     0.01 MiB                 
lib32-libpulse      2.1-1         3.0-1        0.03 MiB                 
lib32-sqlite        3.7.14.1-1    3.7.15-1     0.00 MiB                 
libpulse            2.1-1         3.0-2        0.16 MiB                 
libwbclient         3.6.9-1       3.6.10-1     0.00 MiB                 
linux               3.6.9-1       3.6.10-1     0.01 MiB                 
ntp                 4.2.6.p5-11   4.2.6.p5-13  -0.05 MiB                
pixman              0.28.0-1      0.28.2-1     0.00 MiB                 
pulseaudio          2.1-1         3.0-2        -0.05 MiB                
python2-beaker      1.6.3-2       1.6.4-1      0.03 MiB                 
python2-distribute  0.6.30-1      0.6.32-1     0.02 MiB                 
python2-mako        0.7.2-2       0.7.3-1      0.00 MiB                 
python2-pyparsing   1.5.6-3       1.5.7-1      0.00 MiB                 
python2-xdg         0.23-2        0.25-1       0.02 MiB                 
samba               3.6.9-1       3.6.10-1     0.02 MiB                 
sbc                               1.0-1        0.24 MiB                 
smbclient           3.6.9-1       3.6.10-1     0.00 MiB                 
sqlite              3.7.14.1-1    3.7.15-1     0.01 MiB                 
vlc                 2.0.4-5       2.0.5-1      -1.42 MiB                
wesnoth-data        1.10.5-1      1.10.5-2     98.07 MiB                
xorg-server         1.13.0.902-2  1.13.1-1     0.00 MiB                 
xorg-server-common  1.13.0.902-2  1.13.1-1     0.00 MiB   

Pulse Audio 2.1 -> 3.0 and a kernel update are hidden in there, and I'd like them to stand out more.

Answer 1

I don't have pacman, but I tested this against your provided input sample, saved to a file and passed to standard in like this:

cat versioninfo.dat | python highlight_major_versions.py

You should be able to pipe the output of your pacman command to the code in the same way. The output on my machine looks like this:

Blue indicates a major version update (i.e. 1st segment). Yellow indicates a minor version update (2nd segment). Red indicates missing version info, in this case because the library is new in this update. I don't do anything clever with - versioning - the - counts as part of the relevant dot-delimited segment.

#!/usr/bin/env python    
import fileinput

# ANSI escape codes for some colours
BLUE   = '\033[94m'
YELLOW = '\033[93m'
RED    = '\033[91m'
ENDC   = '\033[0m'

def colourise_by_version_change(line, prev_v, new_v):
    ''' Colourise the input line based on major/minor version change.'''
    prev_segments = prev_v.split('.')
    new_segments  = new_v.split('.')

    coloured_line = line
    if new_segments[0] > prev_segments[0]:
        coloured_line = BLUE + line + ENDC   
    elif new_segments[1] > prev_segments[1]:
        coloured_line = YELLOW + line + ENDC

    return coloured_line

if __name__ == '__main__':   
    for line in fileinput.input():
        line     = line.strip()
        elements = line.split()
        if len(elements) == 5:
            name, prev_v, new_v, size, size_unit = elements[:5]
            line = colourise_by_version_change(line, prev_v, new_v)

        # There's something missing, so point it out (e.g. a new version)
        else:
            line = RED + line + ENDC

        print line