Other than that, I don't like gentoo's way of dealing with this problems other than the fact they ship tooling to actually deal with the 3-way merge pacman expects from the user. I'd welcome suggestions on this and actually was not smart enough up to now to somehow have a script dig up the old version's unmodified configuration file (to be used in said merge). I know there's the pacman cache, but pacman itself doesn't seem to need that to know there's a merge going on. There's definitely potential in doing this that might benefit everyone, please approach me for a follow-up.
What's wrong with pacdiff(1)? That will happily call vimdiff, or meld, or whatever else you want in the background. Cheers, Bennett -- GPG fingerprint: 871F 1047 7DB3 DDED 5FC4 47B2 26C7 E577 EF96 7808