An Arch Linux News reader designed to also be used as a pacman hook.
Originally I had wanted to make an interactive pacman hook, but pacman is not designed to work that way. So informant will instead interrupt pacman transactions to make sure you have read the news first.
You can install from my AUR package.
Requirements are in requirements.txt. If you want to install it manually.
On the first run informant assumes that you have not read any of the most recent news items.
Use the informant read command specified below to mark items as read.
informant provides 3 subcommands, 'check', 'list' and 'read'.
informant check - will check for any unread news items, if there is only one
unread item it will print it and mark it as read. Informant check will exit with
return code equal to the number of unread news items (even if there is only
one). This is the command used by the pacman hook, so that if there are unread
news items it will interrupt your pacman transaction.
informant list - will list the titles of the most recent news items
(regardless of whether or not they have been read, unless the '--unread' option
is given). There is also a '--reverse' option if you prefer to see them newest
to oldest.
informant read - if given a news item, will print that item and mark it as read.
You can specify a news item as either an index or a string matching the title.
If you want to use an index it must only be that shown when running informant list
(without '--unread' or '--reverse'). If no item is given, will begin looping through
all unread items, printing each one and marking them as read with a prompt to continue.
Passing the '--all' flag will mark all items as read without printing them.
More options can be found by reading informant --help or man informant.
informant provides a PreTransaction pacman hook, so that it can interrupt a
pacman transaction if there are unread Arch Linux News items. This hook runs on
Upgrades and Installs, but not Removes. If for some reason the hook (or
informant) breaks in such a way that you cannot run a successful pacman
transaction (even after trying to read the news) you should be able to pacman -Rsn informant.
informant installs its hook to /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/ so you should also be
able to override the pacman hook by placing a new hook in
/etc/pacman.d/hooks/00-informant.hook or disable it by placing a symlink to
/dev/null in that location (e.g. ln -s /dev/null /etc/pacman.d/hooks/00-informant.hook).
More information on pacman hooks can be found in man alpm-hooks.