Subjectively speaking, you might want to see release notes for packages, whether you’re installing them or updating them. (If this isn’t down your avenue of caring or you’re looking for a more exciting post, then, you can probably just skip this rest of this, altogether. True story.)

Anyways, if you use terminal to update your machine, there’s a Debian package (sorry, other flavours, I haven’t dug into it but maybe you have the equivalent?) that – when installed – will configure apt-get to automatically prompt you with the release notes for any update or package that you install.

Of course, the caveat is that if you’re updating (e.g.: upgrade), the release notes are shown just before install.

The package, in question, is called apt-listchanges. You can see screenshots of it in action, here.

Install it as you would any other package and that’s it. 🙂