Yeah, but that adds complexity in the fact that pacman must have code to read the old format, and the new... and how long do we maintain this format? It'd have to be there until all repos switch the format (and they'd have to be converted each -Sy operation until then) AND a new iso with pacman3 is created.
Let us go back to days of yor. Once upon a time, pacman's db format looked different than it does today. [jchu@wingnut pacman-2.9.8-4]$ cat /var/lib/pacman/local/pacman-2.9.8-4/install ... post_upgrade() { if [ ! -d var/lib/pacman/local ]; then echo "==> Converting database..." >&2 mkdir -p var/lib/pacman/local && usr/bin/convertdb var/lib/pacman/local echo "==> Done." >&2 fi ... Not trying to argue for changing the db format now, just mentioning that it's been done before and the references still exist.
The REAL question here is, should the pacman 3.0 release be delayed for something like this, or should we hold of until 3.1?
As nice as it sounds, I think top priority is getting 3.0 out. I vote to not delay it. Jason