I’m working an intermediary library in Python that turns a fair number of normal databases and database-like stores into simple key-value stores. There’s a long story of why, but it does it have an actual use case outside of “because I can” (though, the symlink backend is pure, unadulterated “because I can”).

For the SQLite store I was running into transaction issues here and there. At seemingly-random times data wouldn’t save or I’d get an error saying a transaction hadn’t been started when I tried to commit. So, I did some research.

Oh pip. Every time I think you can’t do it, I realize I haven’t updated lately.

Update pip with pip install -U pip and then you can do this:

$ pip list --outdated
cffi (Current: 0.8.2 Latest: 0.8.6)
Glances (Current: 2.0.1 Latest: 2.1.2)
Jinja2 (Current: 2.7.2 Latest: 2.7.3)
jira-cli (Current: 0.4.2 Latest: 2.0.1)
…

Note the output has the package all by itself at the start of the line. The Unix geek in me salivated at that because it lends itself nicely to: