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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 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.

Redux:
/usr/lib/zomg.so is not owned by any package. Allow foobar-1.0-2 to
overwrite this file? [y/N]

Optional:
s/overwrite/claim ownership of/