[Rpm-maint] RFC: SUSE/openSUSE's proposed relocation of /var/lib/rpm

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2017, at 06:56 AM, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> I don't see /usr/lib as a *good* place for this, but if a new top level 
> directory in /usr seems too much then maybe /usr/lib/sysimage or such 

I'm OK with /usr/lib/sysimage.

> As Neal pointed out, there's dpkg and the other package management 
> systems that put their stuff in /var too. And you don't need to go even 
> outside the rpm land for those other things, there's yum/dnf/PackageKit 
> (and who knows what else) that keep their own databases on 
> install-related information in /var.

Yes; those are generally not designed with snapshots in mind either.
For rpm-ostree, we import each RPM into an ostree repo
(https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/pull/1055 for some
 current work in this area)
and we put metadata (e.g. the source repo ID) in the ostree commit:
https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/blob/c107a05b8e26ecfe30c679dd98570bfc4cf38005/src/libpriv/rpmostree-unpacker.c#L432