[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] What's the scope of --root (supposed to be)? (Discussion #2735)

[Sam Morris]

I think I've stumbled into this. I was trying to use a public GitHub Actions runner to create container images built from the `ubi-micro` images, which don't have `dnf` installed within.

I found that `dnf --installroot=... install` failed  because the PGP keys it wanted weren't found in the RPM database. If I worked around that problem then I found that the the container's RPM database in `/var/lib/rpm` was not being updated by DNF. Instead, a new RPM database was created in `/home/runner/.rpmdb`! The ultimate cause of both problems was a [a Debian patch](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=551669) which defines %_dbpath as `~/.rpmdb`.

But this isn't specific to Debian either; the following is run on Fedora 39:

```
$ ctr=$(buildah from registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9/ubi-minimal)

$ mnt=$(buildah mount $ctr)

$ dnf --noplugins --releasever=9 --installroot="$mnt" list --installed | wc -l
0

$ chroot "$mnt" rpm -qa | wc -l
103
```

DNF sees no packages installed with the installroot, because the host configuration defines `%_dbpath` as `/usr/lib/sysimage/rpm`, again different from how it's defined in the `ubi-micro` container image.

I suppose what I've learned is that you can't really use a host's DNF/rpm to install into a chroot if the distro/config differs too much between the host and the chroot.

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