In Arch Linux, to check what updates are available, you can use the checkupdates
command, but this command does not apply to the AUR package. To check what AUR package updates are available, use the yay -Qua
command. Both commands will display a list of packages that have the latest version, but both commands also display packages that are installed as dependencies. Here, I only care about the list of packages that I installed myself (Explicitly installed). Therefore, I created a cli tool called axu (Arch eXplicit Updates).
axu is similar to the checkupdates
and yay -Qua
commands, except that it only displays a list of explicitly installed packages (not dependencies). axu also provides better output than checkupdates
and yay -Qua
because axu separates each update into 5 categories, namely:
- Major
- Minor
- Patch
- Build
- Git
Determining the type of update is by following the semantic versioning (SemVer) rules.
For those of you who want to try it, this package is already available on AUR:
yay -S axu-bin
This program was originally written in TypeScript, but then I ported it to Rust.
I’m not sold, why do I need this?
Agreed. Pretty sure pacman can filter by explicitly installed packages by itself and enough packges don’t follow SemVer.