On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 09:19:10AM +0200, Martin Kühne via aur-general wrote:
It is also a good idea to use conflicts=() to prevent packages from providing the same thing from being installed.
I'd clarify this by saying that if two packages have conflicting files, pacman will still not allow the installation of both at the same time (without the force flag). The conflicts array is still definitely the right way to go, however. There could be a valid case for installing two packages that provide the same thing if they do not conflict on the filesystem. Another key purpose of the conflicts array is to facilitate switching between the two packages. If A depends on X and Y provides X, then without the conficts array set, switching to Y would require separate actions of removal of X and installation of Y. But the removal of X is (near) impossible because A depends on X. With Y's conflicts array containing X, installing Y will offer to replace X with Y in one shot. Cheers David