This is a tool for NixOS to display updates to installed packages and their dependencies.

4 package update(s)

linux: 4.20.10 -> 4.20.11
curl {bin}: 7.63.0 -> 7.64.0
fish: 2.7.1 -> 3.0.0
^ db: 4.8.30 -> 5.3.28
^ pcre2: 10.31 -> 10.32
wine-wow {staging}: 4.0-rc5 -> 4.2

The ^ arrow in front of the db and pcre2 packages indicate that they were only updated for the fish package, and not globally.

Due to the nature of how NixOS handles updates, you can only see which packages were updated after you update your system, and you must run the tool before you update in order to save the current system package state. You will also need to run the program as root if SQLite has not been compiled with SQLITE_USE_URI=1.

To save the current package state, run the program with the -s flag. Note that you don't necessarily have to save the package state before every update; so you could, for example, run it once a week or month if you'd rather see all of the updates made over that kind of time period.

After you have updated your system, you can simply run the program without any arguments and it will display any package updates that have been made since the package state was last saved.

For a small example of the program being used in an update script, see here: https://github.com/Acizza/dotfiles/blob/desktop/updatesys.sh

If you'd like to use this program in your system overlay, you can find a Nix package definition for it here: https://github.com/Acizza/nixos-config/blob/desktop/overlays/pkgs/nixup.nix