[arch-general] First Problem with pacman - Need to understand why

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Guilherme M. Nogueira
<g.maionogueira at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>  pacman cares because pacman will try it's hardest to never ever break
>> your system unless you say so. If pacman has no knowledge of files in
>> your system, it'd be amazingly stupid to blindly overwrite them. What
>> happens if I wrote a big long OOo document and saved it (stupidly) as
>> /usr/bin/mydoc and then pacman decided to install an app named
>> "mydoc". Poof, lost my work.
>>
>> I know the above is a contrived example, but it serves to illustrate
>> the point: pacman is not in control of your system. You are. Pacman
>> will never say "I know better than you, so I'll just replace this with
>> what I think it should be". Instead it will say "woah woah woah... you
>> did something I don't understand. You deal with it and tell me when
>> you figured it out"
>>
>
> These two paragraphs are great, Aaron!
> Would you mind if I add them to the wiki page of Pacman regarding the
> "something: something exists in filesystem" error, or is it too much
> informality for the wiki?

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