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...
This sounds like a good idea. A deprecation message would be needed for some time and the man page should be updated to point the users wanting to fix their database entries to your aforementioned procedure. Speaking of this: is there a place where procedures like this are collected already? The variety of pacman options tend to be a tad overwhelming for the uninitiated ;) I haven't had need of --force except for some wild upgrade instructions of glibc or something along those lines. As a user, I think --force can be removed. Greetings, Christoph