On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com>wrote:
pacman cares because pacman will try it's hardest to never ever break your system unless you say so. If pacman has no knowledge of files in your system, it'd be amazingly stupid to blindly overwrite them. What happens if I wrote a big long OOo document and saved it (stupidly) as /usr/bin/mydoc and then pacman decided to install an app named "mydoc". Poof, lost my work.
I know the above is a contrived example, but it serves to illustrate the point: pacman is not in control of your system. You are. Pacman will never say "I know better than you, so I'll just replace this with what I think it should be". Instead it will say "woah woah woah... you did something I don't understand. You deal with it and tell me when you figured it out"
These two paragraphs are great, Aaron! Would you mind if I add them to the wiki page of Pacman regarding the "something: something exists in filesystem" error, or is it too much informality for the wiki? -- Malformed message exception