[pacman-dev] [feature request] ignore certain file conflicts

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 4:54 AM, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> Hi pacman devs,
>
> Sometimes it happens that a user has to force an upgrade because pacman
> detects an file conflict.
>
> Some of those cases are caused by the known link vs. regular file/directory
> problem.
>
> Others are caused by the fact that a file wasn't tracked by pacman before.
> (e.g. something that was created by an install script before and is part of
> the package itself now)
>
> I am not sure if the first case can even be fixed at all. So what about an
> variable I could define in the PKGBUILD which would handle this?
>
>        overwrite=('usr/lib/somefile' 'usr/lib/someotherfile')
>
> I am not sure if this is completly insane and how difficult to implement this
> mgiht be.

The concept is a decent idea, but we'd really have to make sure it's
used sparingly. I could forsee this overtaking "conflicts" with AUR
packages. Perhaps if this just prompted the user?

   foobar-1.0-2 wants to overwrite /usr/lib/zomg.so. Allow? [y/N]