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.
If I’m checking for updates, I will usually need to update any dependencies too.
I don’t see a reason why only showing updates to explicitly installed packages is a good thing.
If I’m updating or checking for updates, I need to update it all.