[pacman-dev] pacman-disowned

[Jeremy Heiner]

Hi, Dave,
You raise good points. I shall do my best to answer them, but first I
would very much like to hear your thoughts on...

What are the responsibilities of pacman regarding managed directories
versus files/links? The mtrees enable -Qkk to report altered
files/links. But what things should count as altered for dirs? Is it
only (as currently implemented) the removal of the entire dir? Why
doesn't adding to a dir count as an alteration?

So I don't feel my proposal is fairly characterized as having pacman
deal with files it is not responsible for. It owns those managed dirs
and is responsible for them. It knows exactly what it put into those
dirs, and any additions constitute a divergence of the filesystem from
pacman's database image of it.

There are 3 implementations if you count the original
"pacman-disowned". But they all fail to meet the requirements of the
scenario I described previously. You've mentioned the longish run time
for this feature, and that is in fact motivation for including it in
the pacman binary. Any external script would need to invoke pacman
three times (-Ql, -Qk, -Qkk) in order to meet the requirements. It
does not seem advantageous to force the user to wait three times
longer than necessary.

Looking forward to your response,
Jeremy