Getting more info about updates on headless server

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 09/30/2010 05:45 PM, Richard Fearn wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have yum-updatesd installed on a headless Fedora server, so every so
> often I get the email saying there are updates available.
>
> The email itself doesn't tell me much about the updates (e.g. for
> iproute tonight it said it was a "bugfix"). Running yum update on the
> server doesn't tell me much either.
>
> In the past I modified yum-updatesd-helper to look in the
> package-announce list archives
> (http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/) to find
> each update, and to build a bodhi search URL, using the package
> name/version. Then there were at least 1 or 2 links in the
> yum-updatesd email that I could click on to get some more information.
>
> Is there a more standard way of getting this info? (Not the links, but
> the information about the updates.)

You could download the RPMs (yumdownloader?) and look at changelogs:

rpm -q --changelog -p <packagename.rpm>

I seem to rememeber people talking about a way to do it directly from 
yum without downloading the package, but I don't remember the details.