It had disturbed me that with “zypper update” I could see which patches it was about to install, but not why. I missed the patch info from yast, so I wrote this little helper script “sup” (contraction of SUse-UPdate). It refreshes the DB, lists info for all new patches, and finally downloads them. The python part is for cleanly extracting the patch info, and the awk part is for prettifying. (You can remove the whole awk call, if you aren’t into colored stuff.) It’s recommended to add password-less sudo rules for “zypper refresh” and “zypper update”.
http://members.aon.at/mfranz/sup [1.0 kB]
Maybe someone’s interested in this script. Or maybe just in criticizing it, or suggesting a better way. 