Not really happy with smart

[Ben Segall]

You can do at least most of what you want. First of all, you probably
want to use smart --shell and feed your commands to stdin to save time
loading and updating the cache.

The command 'flag --show new' will show you new packages in a format
like this:

new
    arts = 8:1.5.0-0.1.fc4 at i386
    arts-debuginfo = 8:1.5.0-0.1.fc4 at i386
    arts-devel = 8:1.5.0-0.1.fc4 at i386
    gdesklets = 0.35.2-22.fc4 at i386

However this will show all new packages, not just new upgrades. You
could then do a 'query --installed' and take the intersection of these
two sets or do a separate query for each one. I don't see a built in way
of just finding packages that are upgrades other than running an upgrade
command.

The channel commands are the way to enable and disable channels.