[Rpm-maint] [Suse patch] Ignore chown errors on install

James Olin Oden james.oden at gmail.com
Tue May 22 19:09:11 UTC 2007


On 5/22/07, Paul Nasrat <pnasrat at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 12:55 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > This looks kinda harmless but raises a few questions. If I correctly
> > tracked this to correlate to this changelog entry in Suse's rpm spec:
> > * Wed Jul 26 2000 - ma at suse.de
> > - ignore chown() errors eg. if files are installed on a DOS partition
>
> I wonder what triggered this initially - it could be eg: a FAT-12/16
> bootloader partition on ppc machines possibly. Michael - do you know
> what the origin of this patch was?
>
> > Do we *really* care about about people trying to install packages on DOS
> > (and related) filesystems? They don't support symlinks, file permissions
> > etc etc etc, that chown() doesn't work is probably the least of the
> > problems trying to run something from a DOS-like fs.
>
> Which for the most packages yes they won't run but a bootloader may be a
> niche case. I feel we probably should fail gracefully
>
> > If the answer would be yes, we do care, then I'd think similar warnings
> > should be issued for chmod() etc as well, lotsa similar potential cases
> > around it. But I would say we don't really care, DOS-like filesystem isn't
> > supportable in any sane way no matter what errors rpm ignores.
>
> I agree, for the most part we don't particularly care about the DOS fs
> case but we probably should check errors, other things may cause
> chown/chmod/etc to fail with EPERM (eg SELinux) so error checking may be
> valuable in diagnosing along with appropriate audit messages.
>
Yes checking for errors is IMO the first step towards producing a
truly hardened package manager.   There is almost nothing more onerous
than an error without any sort of contextual message to help you
discern what just happened.

Cheers...james



More information about the Rpm-maint mailing list