[arch-general] pacman overwriting files (was Re: dcron 4.2)

[Dimitrios Apostolou]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 5:43 PM, Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
>> Am 13.01.2010 00:34, schrieb Dimitrios Apostolou:
>>> Since I've been bitten by this, how can I know if the file I modified is
>>> goint to be overwritten or not, *before* it actually happens? And even
>>> if it is, a .pacsave wouldn't hurt anyone, if I remember correctly (it's
>>> been some time) I had completely lost my changes, and I had to rewrite
>>> them.
>>
>> pacman -Qii is your friend.
>
> This.
> pacman -Qii dcron will show you all the backup files that pacman will
> take care of.
>

Guys that thing bit me again: During the big libpng upgrade "initscripts" 
package got upgraded too and /etc/rc.{sysinit,shutdown} got overwritten 
without notifying me. Because of special changes I've made to mount /var 
as tmpfs, and because I forgot to put the files in the NoUpgrade line of 
pacman.conf, the system was unbootable and after fixing it pacman wants to 
download 500MB of packages again (ideas?). :-@

Can't pacman just emit a big fat warning like: 
WARNING: /etc/rc.sysinit USER CHANGES OVERWRITTEN

Since this case is extremely rare, the message would appear scarcely. I 
can't thing of anything negative for such a feature.


Dimitris