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

[Xavier]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 11:54 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 completely insane and how difficult to implement this
> might be.
>

In the case of a symlink directory problem, we could have many file
conflicts, it would seem quite ugly to have to overwrite all the files
inside.
IIRC, Nagy had several ideas about possible fixes for these problems
(or maybe not all problems, but at least some of them).
And if we are going to put some effort on something related to file
conflicts, it would make more sense to try to fix/improve this code
rather than providing a workaround.
But if there is no one to put some effort to start with, then we don't
have any problems for figuring out what should be done :)

Of course, there are also the cases where the conflict is real and a
file wasn't tracked by pacman. So I am not sure either.