[arch-general] pacman -- force removal despite dependencies (libgl)

[Stephen Wilkinson]

Hello All,

I have both xf86-video-vesa and nvidia-96xx installed, but I have
issues with the proprietary drivers, so I wanted to try out vesa with
libgl.

I can remove nvidia-96xx, but trying to remove nvidia-96xx-utils flags
lots of conflicts. I was going to use pacman -Rc but that would mean
uninstalling (and later reinstalling) lots of packages... and I'm
thinking there must be a quicker and more elegant way about this.

I was wondering if there's a way to force removal of nvidia-96xx-utils
and ignore the dependencies since libgl will satisfy them anyway. (I
know in general it would not be a good idea for pacman to allow
this...)

I tried pacman -R --force but that doesn't work (--force is not a
removal option).

I thought about forcing the installing of libgl with -f instead, but I
thought it would be neater to remove nvidia-96xx-utils first
(otherwise I will have problems later when it comes to delete either
package?)

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated!

Steve