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@dslink can you provide an example of what you are trying to do and what error message you are seeing?

the read command is making everything fail even just with pacman no aur helpers

Oh okay, thanks for the explanation @bradford-smith94. I already have an alias+script in bashrc to update all system+AUR packages and clean orphaned ones etc, so I just add read and check to that before the update/upgrade commands so that it'll always succeed once pacman starts going over the hooks. And in case of install I can set up another alias, I think.

@kortewegdevries I tried to make the hook interactive, it was my original idea and intention for the user to be able to read all unread news items and then choose to either continue or stop the transaction, but the pacman source code does not make that possible. When pacman executes a hook it closes stdin, so there is no way to get any input from the user. So doing check and read in the hook is not possible to do in a way that makes sure the user has time to actually read the news.

Since an interactive hook wasn't possible I chose to just have the hook stop updates so that you can have time to read the news before the transaction completes, especially since sometimes the news alerts you to manual intervention needed before/during the update.

In the case that there are more than 1 unread news items, you should use informant read before running an install/update. If you forget, that's fine informant will stop your update with a message like the screenshot you first posted. You can then use informant read and then re-run your update.

In the case that there is exactly 1 unread news item, the hook (check command) will print it and still fail (so you have time to read the news). This way running informant read as a second step is not required, you can just re-run your update.

Thanks @bradford-smith94. Do you mean I should do informant read on another terminal before running an install/update? Because currently the informant hook prevents pacman from completing if items are not read. And it just checks for new items, doesn't give me an option to read them in middle of a pacman transaction. To avoid this should the hook exec be check and read both?

@kortewegdevries That is the intended behavior. informant will stop your pacman transaction to give you time to/force you to read the news items that you may have missed. You can use informant read to read through the news items and then running your pacman command again should be successful.

Hi, is this warning supposed to be? I'm in the informant group and packages install just fine but the hook seems to report false...https://imgur.com/wG30EPZ Thanks.