Hacker News Reader

Comment by steerablesafe | Hacker News Reader

If you only install supposedly non-conflicting packages, and there are conflicting file locations, isn't that a packaging bug?

View on HN

Yes, and they did say they were going to file bugs:

> Investigate the file conflicts and file some Arch Linux bugs.

with a link to https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/73574, which is indeed a bug in the packaging script (it fails to consider python version 3.10 because it only globs 3.?).

Ah, I missed that.

Not if you disable file conflict checking, as the author did.

> As we used a lot of unsafe hacks (disabling dependency and file conflict checking, for instance) to get this to actually work, I wouldn’t recommend using this system for anything other than proving it’s possible.

Sounds like it, yeah.

Some packages give you options for different packages that conflict. E.g. if you install i3 it will let you choose between standard i3, i3-gaps or 5 others. You can only have one installed at a time.

I've been using Pacman for years never had a single problem with conflicts or anything else.

Yes, and they should be marked as conflicting, as OP suggested.

according to the wiki[1], packages which are non-cohabiting alternatives should use both "provides" and "conflicts" (and it's sufficient to list the original package name in conflicts, rather than all of the conflicting alternatives).

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#Package_relations

Reply on news.ycombinator.com