On Sun, 26 Jun 2005, Pavel Cahyna wrote:

> I installed libxen from pkgsrc-wip and at the end, the following was
> printed:
>
> ===> Registering installation for libxen-2.0.6
> pkg_create: Overwriting /usr/pkg/include/xc.h - pkg xentools12-040418 bogus/conflicting?
> pkg_create: Overwriting /usr/pkg/lib/libxc.so - pkg xentools12-040418 bogus/conflicting?
>
> This warning was not very useful, because those files belonging to
> xentools12 were already overwritten when it was printed.
>
> Shouldn't the check for conflicting files be performed before the actual
> installation, instead of after it? Currently, a package without explicit
> conflict can damage other installed packages, which seems wrong to me.

It could be a little difficult to check this using pkgsrc, but possible.
One way would be to create wrappers for all INSTALL_* scripts, cp, mv,
tar, cpio, pax, and any other tools used to install files so they can
check first. Also we would need to check to make sure /bin/cp and other
hard-coded tools for installing are not done also and just use our
wrappers instead. I don't have the time to do this myself for even the
packages that I help maintain.

As for just using binary packages with pkg_add it would be good if it
didn't blindly overwrite files unless specifically requested.

 Jeremy C. Reed

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