FS#50165 - [checkupdates] machine-readable output format

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Simon E. Silva Lauinger (simonsilvalauinger) - Wednesday, 27 July 2016, 08:26 GMT
Last edited by Allan McRae (Allan) - Tuesday, 11 October 2016, 10:25 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Scripts & Tools
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 5.0.1
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Extend checkupdates to support a machine-readable output format.
With a parameter e.g. "-m" or "--machine-readable" checkupdates could print out the fields of the list of updates seperated via e.g. tabs of semicolons. I would avoid colons, because the package version itself can use them as seperator between the epoch and the pkgver field.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Allan McRae (Allan)
Tuesday, 11 October 2016, 10:25 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't fix
Additional comments about closing:  contrib removed from pacman codebase
Comment by Kyle Keen (keenerd) - Wednesday, 27 July 2016, 14:08 GMT
How are tabs more machine readable than spaces?
Comment by Simon E. Silva Lauinger (simonsilvalauinger) - Wednesday, 27 July 2016, 14:11 GMT
The current output format is:
[packagename] [oldversion] -> [newversion]
Better machine-readable would be somthing like:
[packagename];[oldversion];[newversion]
or
[packagename]\t[oldversion]\t[newversion]
Comment by Kyle Keen (keenerd) - Wednesday, 27 July 2016, 14:21 GMT
Yes, and how is that better? Are computers incapable of using space as a separator as well as ignoring the third column?

Spaces are not allowed in package names or versions. The output is already completely machine readable.
Comment by Johannes Löthberg (demize) - Thursday, 13 October 2016, 21:54 GMT
Yeah, if the format wasn't fixed/hard to parse, fine, but as it is, it's more complexity for no reason. Eg:

checkupdates | while read name old _ new; do printf '%s %s %s\n' "$name" "$old" "$new"; done

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