[pacman-dev] [PATCH] sync: avoid checking file conflicts with --dbonly

[Dan McGee]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 10:19 AM, Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Am 25.11.2011 16:47, schrieb Dave Reisner:
>> Well, ideally, on -S --dbonly if there's a file conflict, the packages
>> will also have a conflicts= (which will still be honored). Yes, this is
>> all extremely hackish and shouldn't be used. Never the less, if you're
>> performing an operation on the DB only, it really should be on the DB
>> only.
>
> Ideally, pacman would ignore file conflicts in the file system only if
> the files do not belong to any package. If the conflicting files belong
> to an installed package, it should still abort and require -f.

Taking another quick look at this old patch.

Given that --dbonly is probably used by 0.1% of our users, if that,
I'm inclined to just apply the original patch. Yes, you could hose
your database, but if you're even using dbonly, you are in a sense
doing that anyway.

I feel like --dbonly is an option from years ago that has lost its
original usefulness (I'm not even sure what that was, to be honest).
If it is only to fake having a package installed, wouldn't it be
easier to have some sort of fake provision allowance in pacman.conf or
something?

    FakeInstalled = python-random-module-from-pip=4.2.1 cpan-module=234

-Dan