[arch-general] dovecot.conf kills update (conflicting file)

[Pierre Chapuis]

On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:02:53 -0500, "David C. Rankin"
<drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:

> 	I'm not knocking Arch, I'm just trying to explore how much work it
> would take to make pacman just a little smarter so it avoids some of
> these things. That is what I DON'T know.

The work it would take is not the only problem. I (and probably other
people too) don't want Pacman to be too smart. Because it does only what
it must in a conservative manner, I can understand what it does and fix
my system if needed. For instance, I had the same problem with Dovecot
and I understood immediately what had happened so I changed my
configuration file and it didn't crash on reboot.

The more things a tool does, the more difficult it is to understand.
Aptitude is probably "smarter" than Pacman but I screw my system up a
lot more when I use it on Debian than when I use an Arch box. That's the
advantage of simplicity: as an operations guy I prefer to run several
commands and edit a bunch of configuration files but know perfectly what
I've done than run one command that works 99% of the time but doesn't
give you a chance to fix the system when it screws up.

-- 
Pierre 'catwell' Chapuis