View the Change-Log for packages before upgrading, with Paradox

Paradox has had this feature for a while, but I've never blogged about it. When you're in the Packages Menu, and you're about to upgrade your packages with the always reliable U x, do you ever wonder what's actually changed in them? When I do it, there's usually something between 5 and 20 of them just waiting for me to answer y, but rarely do I see any actual difference in the new versions.

With Paradox you can find out what's been happening to a package, by listing all of its commits that happened since the version you have installed. Of course, this isn't a proper Change-Log —for starters, it's a lot noisier— but since most packages don't have one, this is the closest thing we have.

1. Open the menu as usual with paradox-list-packages (which really ought to be in your launcher map).
2. Hit f u to filter by upgradeable packages (did you know you could do that, by the way?).
3. Hit l on any package to list the commits.

Here's an example of what you might see.

Note how the first three commits are highlighted. These are the ones I'm about to install. It even tells me there a comments discussing one of them, so I might want to have a closer look. Hitting RET on a line will visit the relevant commit on Github.

As you may have guessed, this only applies to packages on Github. But, at this point, that's where most of them are.