Proposal of a feature.

Hi. Because I, and the Arch project itself hits this limitation of pacman often enough. I wanted to write a proposal on how to handle this. Sadly I'm not a programmer and cant write the code for it myself. Sorry for this! The next best thing is to write how I (in fact "we") imagine how it would work out the best way.


supersedefile=()
Array of (full) paths of files the package wants to replace

How it should work:
To work 3 conditions needs to be fulfilled.
1. the PKGBUILD needs to have a full path set in the 'supersedefile' array
2. the package, needs to have a real file in place for every file path set in 'supersedefile'
3. the path needs to be an >not< owned file (no belonging to any package)

Condition 1: Set to be sure that a file will not conflict with, but replace a file on the FS. The default behavior to conflict is a good default and should stay that way.

Condition 2: Because we need to be sure that the path that is set, will also be used by the package and is not some kind of placeholder. It will also verify, that the new file belongs to the package.

Condition 3: To make is safe, that the file it replaces is not part of another package, as well as not part of its own package in an earlier version, that could overwrite a users change.


Examples where this feature is useful:
* most times of packaging errors where your users have to use --overwrite
* https://www.archlinux.org/news/firewalld081-2-update-requires-manual-intervention/
* https://www.archlinux.org/news/hplip-3203-2-update-requires-manual-intervention/

* For a software that was creating its default config on 1st start to /etc, but because of the move to wayland and the removal of writing to /etc (because no root anymore) now requires that the default config is shipped by the package and there is no straight forward feature to replace a file and make the package its new owner without any hacky move. <- That's the one I face rn