[arch-dev-public] [RFC] dealing with fileconflicts

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

We have the following problem:

At the moment /etc/mtab is being generated at boot (so it is not owned
by any package). However, we want to replace it with a symlink
pointing to /proc/self/mounts (preferably owned by util-linux).

If we do this, there will be a conflict on upgrade and users have to
manually delete /etc/mtab before upgrading. To avoid user intervention
we could just create the symlink in a postupgrade/postinstall script
in util-linux, but I'm not sure if that is something we want to be
doing.

Is there any way to tell pacman to "ignore conflicts with this
particular file, just overwrite it"?

Any thoughts?

Tom