[pacman-dev] Do we need the force option?

[Jakob Gruber]

On 02/09/2013 11:36 AM, Christoph Vigano wrote:
> On 09.02.2013 11:27, Allan McRae wrote:
>> 
>> 3) get rid of --force altogether!
>> 
>> I have good feelings about #3.   When do we actually NEED
>> --force?   In most cases a simple rm will fix the conflict and it
>> forces (pun!) the user to think about what is being done.
>> 
>> There is only one case I can think of where that is not
>> appropriate - when a user is trying to recover from deleting
>> their local pacman database.   But then they can use --dbonly to
>> get the initial fix done, and will need to -Qk and rm etc as
>> necessary...
>> 

I'm not too happy about this to be honest. I've often had cases in
which disk failures / crashes during updates / other causes left me
with packages that did not own any of their files. Removing those
one-by-one would be extremely tedious.

Not only that, but removing them manually before re-installation
means these files are inaccessible for a much longer time than when
using --force.

My favorite option is #2. And if #3 is chosen, consider providing the
conflicting file lists in a form that can be passed to rm (while still
keeping information about which package causes the conflict).

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 555 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/attachments/20130209/79eb99a9/attachment.asc>