[pacman-dev] handling of provides/conflicts packages

[Scott Horowitz]

So here's the scenario: mplayer is in current, mplayer-svn is in
unstable. mplayer-svn provides and conflicts with mplayer. As is
typically the case with packages in current, mplayer has no provides
or conflicts for packages outside of current/extra (mplayer-svn in
this case).

If you have mplayer-svn installed and try to install mplayer, you get
the following:
$ pacman -S mplayer
resolving dependencies... done.
looking for inter-conflicts...
:: mplayer conflicts with mplayer-svn. Remove mplayer-svn? [Y/n] y
done.
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: mplayer-svn requires acidrip
:: mplayer-svn requires mplayer-plugin

First off, I think that "done" is probably a bug - mplayer-svn wasn't
removed ;-) And secondly, it seems like pacman should be able to
handle this swap of mplayer-svn->mplayer even when the mplayer
pkgbuild doesn't have the provided/conflicts array set. I mean, if
mplayer-svn provides mplayer, doesn't it imply the reverse?

I obviously don't understand the technical details, but this behavior
seems "broken" to me.

Scott