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

[Pierre Schmitz]

Am 27.11.2011 22:16, schrieb 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

Afaik the install script solution wont work as pacman will check for
file conflicts before running the script and thus abort. Imho it's OK to
let the user manually delete that file. We could point to this in an
announcement as we did many times before. We still aim for "competent
users" so avoid user intervention at all costs is not our way;
especially if the straight forward solution is that easy.

Greetings,

Pierre

-- 
Pierre Schmitz, http://pierre-schmitz.com