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

[Paul Nasrat]

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.

Paul