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How should I deal with pacnew?
(lemmy.kde.social)
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pacnew files are created when the package has changed it, but so have you. So you would replace it only if you don't care about the changes you have locally. Otherwise you likely want to diff them and manually merge in any new changes to the config. Generally speaking most should not make your system unbootable, but I would look more closely at any core system files and see what the changes are rather then just blindly accepting them. Even if you do that for less critical packages.
but I didn't change any of those files manually, so are they changed by some other program?
What does
pacman -Qii $PACKAGENAME
say about the file in question?