Check Pacman Updates

Report which packages have official-repo updates available, with a short changelog summary per package where one can be found. Never install, upgrade, or modify any package — this skill is read-only/reporting only.

AUR updates (via yay or other AUR helpers) are out of scope for now — official repos only.

Hard rule: no upgrades

Do not run pacman -Syu, pacman -S <pkg>, or anything with --noconfirm on an install/upgrade operation. Only run the query/check commands below. If the user asks you to actually apply the updates after seeing the report, confirm with them explicitly before running any install command.

Step 1: Detect available tools

command -v pacman >/dev/null || echo "pacman not found — not an Arch-based system"
command -v checkupdates >/dev/null || echo "checkupdates not found — needs pacman-contrib"

• If pacman is missing, stop and tell the user this isn't an Arch-based system.
• checkupdates (from the pacman-contrib package) is the only mechanism this skill uses to check updates: it syncs a temporary copy of the package database instead of the real one, so it can't cause a partial upgrade. Do not fall back to pacman -Sy / pacman -Qu — if checkupdates isn't installed, tell the user to install pacman-contrib (sudo pacman -S pacman-contrib, which they must run themselves) and stop there.

Step 2: List pending updates

checkupdates

Output is lines like pkgname oldver -> newver. Exit code 2 / no output means no updates.

Step 3: Best-effort changelog per package

For each outdated package, also grab the one-line package description from the sync db so the report can show what each package is:

pacman -Si <pkgname> 2>/dev/null | grep -i '^Description'

Keep the description to a single sentence (trim trailing punctuation/whitespace as needed). If pacman -Si returns no Description line, fall back to the installed package's info:

pacman -Qi <pkgname> 2>/dev/null | grep -i '^Description'

If neither yields a description, use "-" in the report.

Then, for the changelog, try these in order and use the first that yields something useful. Keep the summary to 2-4 bullet points per package — don't dump full changelogs.

1. Installed changelog file (rarely populated for modern packages, but free to check):

   pacman -Qc <pkgname>

   If it returns ERROR: no changelog available for '<pkgname>', move on.
2. Upstream project changelog/release notes — get the project URL, then fetch it:

   pacman -Si <pkgname> 2>/dev/null | grep -i '^URL'

   If the URL points at GitHub/GitLab, use WebFetch on that repo's releases or tags page (e.g. https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/releases) and summarize what changed between the old and new version tags. If it's a project with its own changelog page/file, fetch that instead.

If neither yields anything, report the package with old→new version and note "no changelog found" rather than guessing.

Scale the effort to the number of updates. If there are only a handful of packages, fetch changelogs for all of them. If there are dozens (common after not updating for a while), fetch changelogs only for the packages the user is likely to care about (e.g. major/core packages: kernel, drivers, desktop environment, browsers) and note how many minor/library packages were skipped, offering to fetch more on request.

Step 4: Report

Present a single markdown report. Always include both an "update all" command and a per-package update command list at the end — the user asked for these recommendations to be part of every report. Do not run these commands yourself; present them for the user to run (see the hard rule in the intro and the edge case below).

# Pending Updates

## Official repos (N)

| Package | Description | Current | New | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| linux | The Linux kernel and modules | 6.9.1-1 | 6.9.2-1 | - Fixes X driver regression\n- Security patch for Y |
| curl | Command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs | 8.7.0-1 | 8.8.0-1 | no changelog found |

## Summary

Total: N updates pending. No packages were installed or upgraded.

## Recommended update command

Update all pending packages at once:

    sudo pacman -Syu

If there are zero updates, state that plainly instead of showing an empty table (and omit the commands section).

Edge cases

• checkupdates unavailable: report that update checking requires the pacman-contrib package and stop there — do not fall back to pacman -Sy/pacman -Qu.
• No network access: checkupdates will fail to reach mirrors — report the failure, don't fall back to stale local data as if it were current.
• Rate limiting / fetch failures on changelog lookups: skip that package's changelog and note "changelog fetch failed", don't retry indefinitely.
• User asks to proceed with the upgrade after seeing the report: the report already lists the recommended command (sudo pacman -Syu). Confirm explicitly before running any -Syu command yourself; by default present the command and let the user run it.