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.