Pacroller

The "Unattended Upgrades" for Arch Linux.

Concept

Parsing the output of pacman and pacman.log, searching for known patterns and notifying the user whether there is a potential error.
Currently the design is regex-based, any output that is unable to match a set of regex is reported back to the user.

Installation

yay -S pacroller

Usage

pacroller has the following subcommands

run [-d --debug]
    start an upgrade
    if the upgrade fails or pacroller determines that human action is required,
    pacroller writes an exception to the status database, and refuses to run again
    without resetting its failure status.
status [-v --verbose] [-m --max <number>]
    print details of a previous successful upgrade
reset
    reset the current failure status

There is also a systemd timer for scheduled automatic upgrades.

Configuration

Pacroller reads /etc/pacroller/config.json on startup.

custom sync commands

Pacroller can be configured to use custom sync commands, which allows the usage of a different set of mirrors when syncing the database. Enable the "custom_sync" option and write your custom /etc/pacroller/sync.sh.

needrestart

If the "needrestart" option is enabled, needrestart should be called after a successful upgrade.

hold packages

Put your hold packages in a json keyval {package name: regex}, where the regex should have at least one matching group.
If pacroller observes any changes of the matching group or the hold package is to be removed, it refuses to upgrade further.

ignored pacnew

A list of pacnew files that are silently ignored during parsing, any other pacnews will trigger a warning and prevent further upgrades.

custom pacman hooks and packages

Custom pacman hooks and packages output matching is configurable via /etc/pacroller/known_output_override.py.

Limitations

Your favourite package may not be supported, however it's easy to add another set of rules.
Restarting the whole system after a kernel upgrade is not implemented.
Human interaction is required occasionally.
Does not check news from archlinux.org

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