On 02/09/2013 11:36 AM, Christoph Vigano wrote:
On 09.02.2013 11:27, Allan McRae wrote:
3) get rid of --force altogether!
I have good feelings about #3. When do we actually NEED --force? In most cases a simple rm will fix the conflict and it forces (pun!) the user to think about what is being done.
There is only one case I can think of where that is not appropriate - when a user is trying to recover from deleting their local pacman database. But then they can use --dbonly to get the initial fix done, and will need to -Qk and rm etc as necessary...
I'm not too happy about this to be honest. I've often had cases in which disk failures / crashes during updates / other causes left me with packages that did not own any of their files. Removing those one-by-one would be extremely tedious. Not only that, but removing them manually before re-installation means these files are inaccessible for a much longer time than when using --force. My favorite option is #2. And if #3 is chosen, consider providing the conflicting file lists in a form that can be passed to rm (while still keeping information about which package causes the conflict).