Jeff Johnson wrote:
> You were the originator for the feature request of handling fakeroot
> within rpmlib. All I'm doing is fleshing out the details of an implementation
> within rpmlib. Overriding weak symbols from glibc for system calls,
> while not rocket science, does have associated costs, such as interversion
> incompatibilities, as you have pointed out.

Ya I know..  :)  My original request was to allow for installing w/
--root w/o being root (and without scripting).  Much of the
complications come in when you want to deal with scripting or want to
set owners/groups.  If you throw away some of those assumptions then the
problem becomes much easier, and less dangerous.

> Meanwhile, for something as fundamental in rpm as non-root user installs, I'd rather
> have an implementation directly in rpm rather than depending on external
> functionality. fakeroot also won't Just Work if rpm is statically linked iirc, and
> static linking saved my butt several times in the last year after I inadvertently
> trashed glibc. YMMV.

Yup.  I understand.  I think starting w/ emulating chroot is the right
place to go and then branch out from there..  There are just so many
gotchas that have to be done for more generic wrapping that fakeroot
seems to be a better solution right now.

(Maybe a reasonable first step is to document using fakechroot and
fakeroot to do this stuff "out of the box".)

> Meanwhile, emulating chroot and getcwd in userland is likely of more theoretical, rather
> than practical, interest to rpm at the moment.

Yup, understand.

--Mark