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

[Dave Reisner]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 10:29:20AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> 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 hopefully just `pacman -U ./glibc-2.23-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz`, but
see below...

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

makepkg doesn't, but pacman does.

  $ sudo pacman -U cower-16-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.gz
  loading packages...
  resolving dependencies...
  looking for conflicting packages...

  Package (1)  New Version  Net Change

  cow/er       16-1           0.12 MiB

  Total Installed Size:  0.12 MiB

  :: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]

d