pacupdate - A pacman update script

I don't like pacman wrapper programs that obfuscate the entire package management process away from you. Nevertheless, keeping a pacman-based system up-to-date can be tedious as it often involves more than just running pacman -Syu. So here's a Python script that runs through the complete upgrade process (as I understand it). Specifically, these are the steps that the script covers:

• Update the mirrorlist if necessary
• Check if there have been any updates to the Arch News mailing list since the last upgrade
• Check for updates to packages from the pacman repos and from the AUR
  • AUR packages will be considered outdated if any of their dependencies are scheduled for an upgrade
  • AUR packages whose names end in "-git" will also be considered outdated if their upstream git repository has been updated during the last 2 weeks (by default)
• Upgrade all packages that are out-of-date
  • this includes the full build process for AUR packages
• Print out any warnings that Pacman issued during the upgrade process
• Clean up any build dependencies installed during upgrades that are no longer needed

There is an AUR PKGBUILD available here.

Configuration

To customise the script's behavior, a config file can be created at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pacupdate/pacupdate.conf (defaults to ~/.config/pacupdate/pacupdate.conf). Configuration settings should be put either under a [general] or a [build_commands] header and follow a simple format of option = setting.

General

These options are supported under the [general] header

• mirrorlist_url
  URL from which pacupdate will download a fresh mirrorlist. Should be customised to fit with the system's physical location.
  Default: "https://archlinux.org/mirrorlist/?country=all&protocol=http&protocol=https&ip_version=4"
• rss_feed_url
  Address from which pacupdate will fetch a current copy of the news mailinglist. No real reason to change this.
  Default: "https://archlinux.org/feeds/news/"
• mirrorlist_interval
  Interval in days after which a new copy of the mirrorlist should be downloaded. Determined based on the modification timestamp of the system's current mirrorlist.
  Default: 14
• git_interval
  Interval in days after which a git AUR package (a package with a name that ends in "-git") will be checked for updates in its upstream repository.
  Default: 14

The following should only be changed if you have a very specific reason for doing so and you know what you are doing:

• mirrorlist_path
  The path to the mirrorlist used by pacman.
• pacman_db_root
  The root path used by libalpm for all filesystem operations.
  Default: "/"
• pacman_db_path
  Path to libalpm's database.
  Default: "/var/lib/pacman"
• pacman_conf_path
  Path to pacman's configuration file.
  Default: "/etc/pacman.conf"

Build Commands

You can set a custom build command for individual AUR packages by specifying the name of the package followed by = and the command under the [build_command] header. This command will be run instead of makepkg from inside the folder containing the PKGBUILD. For example:

[build_commands]
mu = LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC=C.UTF-8 makepkg

The custom command should result in a package being created in the same fashion that a succesful execution of makepkg would. Otherwise the script will not be able to locate the resulting package.
In nearly all cases, the commands specified here should still include a call to makepkg in some way or another.

Warning!

As is to be expected, this script will execute some commands with elevated privileges using the sudo command. You should not execute a script (most likely one with zero stars, no less) that will run sudo-prefixed commands without checking the source for what those commands are first.