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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis at gmx.net> wrote:
> 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.

I can: extra work for people who are already taxed. You want it? Submit a patch.