On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 03:10:02PM -0400, Travis Willard wrote:

Here's a quick suggestion - far too many times I've seen people blow away their entire /var/lib/pacman/ folder in hopes of getting rid some error message or another, only to realize that pacman ALSO stores its locally-installed info there too and that they're now, essentially, screwed as far as pacman is concerned. Can we put this local info in a different place, or at least separate it from the remote db info a little more clearly?

Like, for example, instead of the current set up of

/var/lib/pacman/local /var/lib/pacman/current /var/lib/pacman/extra etc...

we have

/var/lib/pacman/local/ /var/lib/pacman/remote/current /var/lib/pacman/remote/extra etc...

This structure, to me, makes more sense, since the "local" repo is a totally different beast from the remote repo info. This also allows the creation of a sync-able 'local' repo, like

[local] http://localhost:8080/path/to/local/repo

in pacman.conf without conflicting names.

If nobody has any objections, I suppose I could hack a patch into the files backend that would do this, and possibly move from the current structure to the new one if it detects the old structure.

In addition, those adventurous souls who like rm -r can be told to just rm -r /var/lib/pacman/remote and that will get rid of all remote repo information, which can be freshly obtained with pacman -Sy. I'm not trying to make it idiot-proof, but a clearer boundary between the local info, which should never be touched at the command line unless you really know what you're doing, and the remote stuff, that you can screw over until the cows come home and, in the end, just run pacman -Sy to get it all back.

I like this idea. Just today again, on irc, an user had done that again, while trying to troubleshoot some problems.