* on Saturday, 2019-10-19 05:24 -0700, Andrew Gregory <andrew.gregory.8@gmail.com> wrote:
No rebuilding necessary if the conflicts are changed to just 'sh'.
A circular dependency may not even be necessary in many cases, or ever. All the circular dependency does is force the user to install as provider (by requiring a link package) the first time one of the alternatives is installed. But a user may not want or need to install a provider until other packages depend on it. Then the solution would simplify to just a set of mutually exclusive link packages: sh-bash provides=('sh') depends=('bash') conflicts=('sh') sh-dash provides=('sh') depends=('dash') conflicts=('sh') And pacman luckily finds alternative providers very easily: # pacman -Ss '\bawk\b' core/gawk 5.0.1-1 (base base-devel) [installed] GNU version of awk extra/nawk 20180827-1 The one, true implementation of AWK