For testing the last patch from Nagy that makes the "dependency cycle" warning more verbose, I wanted to do : pacman -S base But then cancel the operation. The problem is that, for every package, I got the following question : local version is up to date. Upgrade anyway? I couldn't use --noconfirm , because I didn't want to actually do the operation, only preview it. Also, --noconfirm will answer other questions than this one. Actually, this is exactly the issue that was mentioned in this thread : http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=35901 The only way was to use the --ask option, which was too complicated and has been removed. We probably don't need the power of this function anyway. But maybe we could have a replacement, just for this "local version is up to date" question. Or, is this question really useful anyway? How often do we try installing an already installed package, without the intention to reinstall it? Or maybe pacman could just print a warning instead : # pacman -S foo warning : foo is already installed ...