On Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:46:14 +1000 Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Sorry, I meant that one of the packages has a directory that exists on the filesystem as a symlink, for example:
filesystem: /lib -> /usr/lib
pkg1: /lib/foo
pkg2: /usr/lib/foo
Without resolving /lib/foo we wouldn't be able to detect the conflict until we started committing the transaction and actually tried to extract the files.
If we removed the handling of symlinks for directories that would be detected as a conflict (/lib symlink on filesystem vs /lib directory in pkg1).
Ah. I guess I didn't fully understand the extent of what you were suggesting. So pacman would not allow any deviation from what the packages provide? That does sound much easier. The only use case I can think of would be people wanting to try merging directories (/bin and /usr/bin for example) without having to rebuild all the necessary packages first.