Flatpak update should show version numbers

[darkdragon-001]

Linux distribution and version

Ubuntu 20.04

Flatpak version

Flatpak 1.6.3

Description of the problem

flatpak update does not show the version to upgrade to before asking for confirmation.

Steps to reproduce

Run flatpak update when updates are available.

[TingPing]

Most of the time it won't have anything useful to say. Minor rebuilds happen all the time.

[darkdragon-001]

This is why it is even more important: With the version displayed, the user can identify when an actual new version is going to be installed or if it is just a rebuild!

[TingPing]

Hmm, Yeah I can see some value there.

[alexlarsson]

Just because the version doesn't update doesn't mean its just a rebuild though. A flatpak is generally made up of many modules, and the version in the appdata only talks about the leaf module (the app). It could be updating some library that fixes important issues. So, versions are not as useful as you might think.

Still, wouldn't hurt.

[berarma]

Sometimes apps have important changes that I'm loooking for and I just want to update because of that version. Sometimes a new version has some bug/incompatibility that I want to avoid. While an unchanged version number might not mean much, a change in the version number might mean a lot.

And if it wasn't too much to ask, displaying also the current installed version would help a lot when looking at changelogs and deciding which updates are worthwhile and which ones can cause trouble.

Thanks for your time.

[rainbyte]

It would be nice to highlight which part of the upstream version changed and to include release number for package re-builds.

Important news from repo can also be shown to warn the user about maintenance periods and/or recent vulnerabilities.

Just as an example, this is how the version numbers appear on my Arch Linux system package manager:

[ivanalejandro0]

flatpak remote-ls --updates gives you some info for the flatpaks that can be updated.

It doesn't show the currently installed version for each one, only the remote version, so you have to check that manually.

I wrote a small tool to get that information for me, maybe it'll be useful to someone else:
https://github.com/ivanalejandro0/flatpak-update-checker/

It's nothing fancy, just combines the info from flatpak remote-ls --updates and flatpak list.