I’ve been wondering how do I get informed about the updates. I’m used to being able to view a user friendly changelog, but with arch I don’t seem to find any.
As an example linux 6.12.7 -> 6.12.7 package was updated recently, but I have no clue why or how to get more info on the changes.
I think you generally want to go to the original source of the package, not arch. For instance, you can see kernel changes at kernel.org, with the release notes for 6.12.7 at https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v6.x/ChangeLog-6.12.7 (though that’s not particularly organized or easy to read). There might sometimes be arch-specific patches on top of that, though, and I’m not sure if there’s anywhere with a general summary of those.
And like the first comment said, changelogs are usually seen on the package’s source page, not in the package manager. Even AUR and GIT packages give you random mumbo jumbo regular people can’t understand.
I’m also curious which distro or package manager actually gives proper changelogs for package updates. I don’t know of any. It is always the package source that contains the changelog.
There’s a new and recently released EndeavourOS app eos-pkg-changelog (in package eos-bash-shared) that shows the changelog information for purely EndeavourOS packages (but not the Arch packages). For example, try command eos-pkg-changelog akm
For the Arch packages the best option seems to be looking at the package history at their gitlab repos, or the package history from the source code found by the source field of the PKGBUILD for each package.
It’s really not that easy, unless every source package would use the same way of documenting changes. Would be nice, if that was the case. For example, there are a lot of differences on how devs document changelogs on github alone.
Nevertheless, it’s not really hard to go to the source of a package and look at the changelog. If you really want to know what changed, it’s just 5 seconds of searching the web.