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).
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