Arch Linux

Gah, no edit button. "These should be removed /opt/texlive/ during this upgrade" should be "/opt/texlive/ should be removed during this upgrade".

Sorry.

pacman doesn't remove directories unless they are empty. You'll need to clean this up manually.

Right, and I already have.

The texlive package should remove directories from old installations and should not generate pacsave files in directories to which it does not install. I'm not sure if this is a pacman issue or a texlive-core issue (a matter of perspective I suppose), but in either case no package completely handled by pacman should leave files anywhere outside the home directory when uninstalled.

If the hierarchy was left because the folders were not empty but the only thing in them were pacsave files, it's obviously a pacman issue. If pacman tried to remove them (or checked if they were empty), it should be easy to make it spit out a "tried to remove /path/to/whatever/ but the directory was not empty" warning.

What you are asking for is impossible. Pacman puts the pacsave in the same directory than the original file. That's the simplest way to do it. It doesn't figure out the new location, in fact I don't even know if it's possible. If the package is removed, it wouldn't make sense to move the pacsave in the new location. On package removal/update, pacman just notifies the user about these pacsave files. It's up to the user to check these files and to remove them if he no longer wants them.

Ok, but pacman is able to remove empty directories when uninstalling a package, right? That means that it checks if the directory is empty when trying to remove it (or maybe it checks every directory in the path and removes every empty one when uninstalling package files).

Would it really be that hard then for it to check if the only file in the directory is a .pacsave file and to display a message without removing the .pacsave file and directory?
E.g. ===>Warning: /path/to/dir/ only contains .pacsave files

Also, just to clarify my tone, it's not "zomfg why can't joo do this!!!!1111", it's "hey, hidden clutter sucks, is there a better way to handle this?". I just don't like the idea that pacman forgets about files and folders that it's created. An alternative would be to keep track of pacsave files somewhere other than the log, but I don't know how much overhead that would lead to, so I leave that as a fleeting thought.

IMO the reason to change current behaviour is too small to justify making things more complicate.

moved to Pacman project as it is more appropriate

Doesn't it tell you it is creating a pacsave file? I think that is more than enough here.

As soon as you start mucking with the normal process and deleting files you shouldn't, you are bound to mess up. I'd rather not royally screw someones system over.

I recommend closing this as this is a case of being a feature rather than a bug.

Since this isn't the normal case, a pre-install/post-install combo would be suited to helping the user in this case, so I think I agree with Allan.