pacnanny
is yet another wrapper script for pacman
, the package
manager of Arch Linux and its various derivatives (I use
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre). Unlike other
wrappers, this script does not aim to make up for any perceived
shortcomings in the functionality of pacman
. Instead, it aims to
make up for shortcomings in the users of pacman
. The goal of
pacnanny
is to make it even harder to mess up with pacman
by
making sure that you do not miss anything important.
Functionality
At present, pacnanny
does the following:
- Before doing a system update, check for new Arch Linux news items since the last update and display them one at a time in the browser of your choosing (w3m by default). There is no confirmation or option to skip this. Your eyeballs are required to look at the news.
- Reprint all warnings again together after the update is completed.
- List new
.pacnew
and.pacsave
files. - Print a warning and ask for confirmation when using the
--force
option. - Prompt for a reboot when the kernel has been upgraded.
Usage
pacnanny
is a thin wrapper that only looks at the arguments you pass
before passing them on and at the output that pacman
produces. You
can simply use the pacnanny
command in place of pacman
and use all
the familiar arguments. So, to do a system update, you would do
pacnanny -Syu
.
Justification
As careful as I try to be when I run pacman -Syu
, I still
occasionally miss things, particularly during large updates that
produce a lot of text. Important warnings sometimes slip between the
cracks, causing me to miss an important new .pacnew
file, for
example. As for the news, I do subscribe to the RSS feed but sometimes
I update the system before opening my newsreader. This forces me to
see the news first.
Contributing
Are there other places that we can help the user avoid shooting himself in the foot? I’m open to ideas. Contributions are welcome as long as they stick to the basic idea of only trying to correct/prevent user-error/carelessness. Also, I’m not great at shell scripting, so please point out any mistakes or places for improvement.
Downloading
While pacnanny
is usable now, no release has been made yet (I’ll
probably make one soon after using it day-to-day for a while). In the
meantime, you can get it from its
Github page.