Hello! Apologies if this has been raised before. I couldn't see anything in the current tracker, and the link to the historical tracker in the repo description is a dead link (at least for me) :sweat_smile:
I'd like to request support for `/etc/pacman.conf.d`. It would differ from the existing `/etc/pacman.d` in the sense that all files in this new `/etc/pacman.conf.d` directory would be treated as if they were concatenated to the end of the main `/etc/pacman.conf`.
Further, I'd request that there is also support for a `/usr/share/pacman.conf.d` directory, which is also merged the same way.
Such a feature would make it much easier for someone who maintains a custom repository to provide it to users. They could, for example, create a simple AUR package that drops a `/usr/share/pacman/conf.d/customrepo.conf` file to add their repository. That would also make it easier for such maintainers to update their repository (relocate it to a new URL, for example).
There's prior art for this. The yum/dnf equivalent of this is `/etc/yum.repos.d`, and Debian has `/etc/apt/repositories`.
My personal use case is thusly: I am working on producing some images that can boot Arch Linux ARM on [Qualcomm MSM8916](https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_410/412_(MSM8916)#Installation) devices. These devices are non-standard enough (special [bootloader](https://github.com/msm8916-mainline/lk2nd), [downstream kernel with much patch-ification](https://github.com/msm8916-mainline/linux)) such that it's entirely likely I'll need to maintain a small set of glue packages that aren't suitable for upstreaming in perpetuity.
When I was researching this topic, I realized that the need for such a thing already clearly exists in the ecosystem. Here's a couple of examples:
* [Arch Linux ARM](https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs/blob/master/core/pacman/pacman.conf) ships an entire copy of the `pacman.conf` which only lightly differs from upstream.
* [DanctNix](https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/blob/master/misc/pacman.conf.aarch64) is also doing the same.
In both cases, it would likely be more ideal if they could simply drop a file into `/usr/share/pacman/conf.d` to add/redefine the appropriate repositories. In doing so, it would reduce the packaging burden, and also (hopefully) reduce the ecosystem fragmentation.
↧