qtile/qtile — pull request #301 by nabobalis (2013-04-12 10:14:50+00:00)
Title: Update pacman.py

Checkupdates is a non-sudo way of checking for updates as using pacman -Qu only checks for out-of-date packages with your local package list. Pacman -Su updates the package lists but requires sudo access to do so.

You could have a cron job that updates the package lists via pacman -Su and then pacman -Qu would suffice. But is not recommended as far as I'm aware.