[pacman-dev] pacman and same empty dirs in both pkgs, problem?

[Dan McGee]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Nagy Gabor<ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>> Maybe instead of trying to remove the directory, it should check all
>> existing packages to see if there is one owning this directory.
>> But this will slow down the -R operation, for each directory inside  a
>> package.
>
> -1. This would induce a memory usage boost for fixing a minor issue. Pacman
> would load _all_ local filelists (the "big" part of local database, in
> addition, loading is slow with empty disk-cache) in even many simple "-S
> one_package" operations. I have seen dont.remove.this.file many times so far
> (for example, in "empty" dirs of some archives), that is much easier in this
> case, too.

One catch here is the original bug dealt with /var/empty. Judging by
the name of that directory, putting anything at all in it would defeat
the point of it, even if it is a bogus/hidden file.

The best thing to encourage here is correct packaging, and use of the
!emptydirs option in the PKGBUILD to ensure removing your package
doesn't remove some system directory that probably didn't need to be
in your package in the first place.

-Dan