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

[Allan McRae]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> 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]
>   

foobar-1.0-2 wants to overwrite /usr/lib/zomg.so _which is not tracked by pacman_. Allow? [y/N]


Otherwise, this is interesting.  A bug report would be good so we keep 
track of this.

Allan