Linux – Update only one package with pacman

Indeed it's possible and of course it exists, but all of the existing projects are still just experiments.

I found two interesting papers:

• A P2P-Based Architecture for Secure Software Delivery Using Volunteer Assistance
• Simulation platform for distributed package management network. Of specific interest is a chapter where the concept of Repository-less Package Management Network is introduced.

So yes, it's possible and it's indeed a really interesting subject.

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