Agreed. 😄 Arch and pacman definitely adheres to this philosophy of “unless you know what you’re doing”. Pacman allows this type of selective upgrade, and it allows to ignore any package you like during a system/all-package upgrade, which may or may not break the system.

You can also post-install make changes to the database of installed packages, like change the install reason for a package (as a dependency or as explicitly installed).

All these things are happily executed without warning. 😁

The reason for the need to check the news is that the system can have any combination of package versions installed, and requiring manual intervention by the user in any quirky upgrade situations helps to keep the complexity down of the system and package manager. I think it’s worth the low complexity.

The overhead of checking the website is super low. It’s basically the same as checking the release notes when there’s a new version of Ubuntu, or whatever other software you might be curious of. Same thing.