[pacman-dev] Merging -S and -U - Was: DWIM if user attempts to sync on a file

[Allan McRae]

On 18/06/16 01:21, Andrew Gregory wrote:
> I would love to rearrange pacman's UI and merge -S and -U into
> a generic install operation.  I haven't worked on it in a while, but
> I would like to see something like this:
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Apg#pacman_ui_reorganization

That seems a big change!   I think merging -S and -U could be a start
along that path which can be done now without a major shift in the way
we do things.

> The problem with allowing -S to handle paths/urls is that package
> package names are also valid paths.  Having pacman attempt to pick the
> one that makes the most sense by default would be okay, but users need
> to have some way to unambiguously distinguish between the two.
> I don't think that just hoping that package names never overlap with
> local files is enough. 

My proposal is repo package take priority (in standard pkgname then
group order - which also has issues!), then files.  Conflicts can be
handled by doing:

pacman -U file:///home/arch/pkgcache/glibc-2.23-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

or is providing a full path enough?  I don't think we allow "/" in
package names...

Allan