possible to install an rpm in user space?

[Stuart D. Gathman]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2010, Jeff Johnson wrote:

> I quibble with "non-trivial": its entirely feasible to prefix
> a path prefix to every open(2)/execv(2) call done by RPM with
> using chroot(2).

chroot requires root privilege.  If enabled by a setuid program,
it is non-trivial to make a chroot environment secure.  I don't
think chroot is required to make it work.

> Why bother with kludges? And multiple rpmdb's is just a loop, all
> RPM versions (since Berkeley DB was added) have multiple open's
> of the /var/lib/rpm DBENV, one for Pubkeys, the other for
> packaging releated indices. All that's needed is to handle different
> paths, one for "system", the other for "user" non-root, stores
> and work through the access patterns.

Yes, that is the key feature required in RPM proper.  If the original
poster would present his use-case, that might help determine the
general usefulness of such a feature to RPM based systems.

-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
    Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
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