Arch’s rolling-release model means breaking changes are announced on the news page, not hidden behind a version number. There’s no “upgrading from 22.04 to 24.04” moment that forces you to read release notes. Packages just update, continuously, and pacman has no idea whether any given update needs your attention first. I’ve seen people say, “An update broke my system, so I’m leaving Arch.” Sometimes the update itself isn’t the real problem. It was a manual intervention announced in the Arch News that went unnoticed.

Why this is easy to skip

pacman -Syu doesn’t check the news for you. It has no concept of “this update requires manual intervention”. That information only exists on the Arch News page. pacman doesn’t know about it, so nothing stops you from updating without reading it first. Most of the time that’s fine. Occasionally it isn’t. A filesystem migration, a bootloader change, a package split that needs a manual step before or after upgrading. The news page is the only place these get announced, and reading it before every update is a discipline, not a safeguard pacman enforces for you.

It’s easy to forget. You’re in a hurry, or you’ve updated your system dozens of times without any issues. Eventually you skip checking the news and that might be the one time it mattered.

What Informant does

Informant closes that gap by turning “read the news” from something you have to remember into something pacman enforces automatically.

It’s a pacman hook, specifically a PreTransaction hook. That means it runs before an upgrade or installation begins, not after.

Install it from the AUR:

yay -S informant

Once installed, its hook checks for unread Arch Linux news items every time you run an upgrade or install. The transaction is aborted before a single package changes that you can’t accidentally proceed without reading the news first. Informant only checks installs and upgrades. Package removals aren’t blocked because Arch News announcements are generally about changes you’ll encounter when installing or upgrading packages.

Informant gives you three subcommands:

  • informant check — checks for unread items. This is what the hook actually calls; its exit code equals the number of unread items, which is how the hook knows whether to abort the transaction.
  • informant list — lists news item titles (add --unread to filter to only what you haven’t read yet).
  • informant read — prints an item and marks it read. Run it with no argument and it loops through everything unread, one at a time.

The actual workflow

Once Informant is installed, your normal update process doesn’t change.

sudo pacman -Syu

If there are unread Arch News items, Informant stops the transaction before any packages are upgraded.

Read the news with:

informant read

When you’ve finished reading, simply run the update again:

sudo pacman -Syu

If there’s no unread news, the update proceeds as usual.

NOTE

When you install Informant for the first time, it treats every existing Arch News item as unread because it doesn’t know what you’ve already read.

Run:

informant read

once after installing it. After that, Informant will only stop you when new Arch News is published.

Where arch-sysreport fits in

Reading a news item doesn’t always tell you whether it actually applies to your system. Some announcements are conditional. For example, “if you’re using this bootloader,” “if this package is installed,” “if you’re on this filesystem.” Answering that usually means running two or three separate commands to check.

That’s exactly why I created arch-sysreport. It collects the system details you typically need when deciding whether a news item applies to your system. Instead of running several separate commands, you get everything in one place.

Informant makes sure you never miss the news. arch-sysreport makes it faster to figure out what to do about it.

Got questions, corrections, or suggestions?

Open an issue on GitHub or drop me an email.

dumidusw
Dumidu GitHub Profile • Email