How do I force remove a package in Arch with pacman?

Question

How do I force remove a package in Arch with pacman while other packages still depend upon it.

pacman -R perl-libwww                                                               
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: perl-app-cpanminus: requires perl-libwww>=5.828
:: perl-app-pmuninstall: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-app-sd: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-catalyst-action-rest: requires perl-libwww>=2.033 
:: perl-catalyst-runtime: requires perl-libwww>=1.64
:: perl-cpan: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-cpan-mini: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-cpan-uploader: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-feed-find: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-http-body: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-http-request-ascgi: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-module-cpants-analyse: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-module-install: requires perl-libwww>=5.812
:: perl-net-trac: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-net-whois-raw: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-prophet: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-rt-client-rest: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-uri-fetch: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-www-mechanize: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-xml-atom: requires perl-libwww
:: perl-xml-feed: requires perl-libwww

basically LWP 6 split a whole bunch of packages, and I need to remove it so I can reinstall it.

Answer 1

You should be able to reinstall the package with a simple:

# pacman -S perl-libwww

This will only remove perl-libwww:

# pacman -Rdd perl-libwww

Please notice the double -d in the command, if you use --nodeps you have to specify that twice too or combine it with a -d like:

# pacman -R --nodeps --nodeps perl-libwww
# pacman -Rd --nodeps perl-libwww

This removes all the packages which depend on perl-libwww:

# pacman -Rc perl-libwww

From pacman's man page:

   -d, --nodeps
       Skips dependency version checks. Package names are still
       checked. Normally, pacman will always check a package’s
       dependency fields to ensure that all dependencies are
       installed and there are no package conflicts in the
       system. Specify this option twice to skip all dependency
       checks.
   -c, --cascade
       Remove all target packages, as well as all packages that
       depend on one or more target packages. This operation is
       recursive, and must be used with care since it can remove
       many potentially needed packages.