FS#2810 - pacman group

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Cameron Daniel (cs-cam) - Tuesday, 07 June 2005, 00:46 GMT
Last edited by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Sunday, 19 August 2007, 21:54 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category
Status Closed
Assigned To Aaron Griffin (phrakture)
Architecture not specified
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7 Wombat
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Could pacman be made to write files owned by pacman:pacman? That way we could make users a member of the pacman group and while they still wouldn't be able to do installs, it would be a nice feature and pave the way for writing scripts that interacted with the package manager and didn't need to be run as root.

Here is a link to the forum thread that spawned this request: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=12788
This task depends upon

Closed by  Dan McGee (toofishes)
Sunday, 19 August 2007, 21:54 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Additional comments about closing:  I agree with RedShift here- modifying the DB is linked with modifying the file system in 99% of cases. Closing because this isn't practical.
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Tuesday, 08 May 2007, 07:48 GMT
I'm going to disagree with this unless it is configurable at build time, just like other packages use some sort of --with-user= parameter to configure (and --with-group=). We shouldn't force a group onto a system.

In addition, when would you want to have scripts modifying the DB not running as root? That could lead to bad things.
Comment by Aaron Griffin (phrakture) - Friday, 11 May 2007, 17:41 GMT
I agree with the last comment. root should be required - pacman installs touch the entire filesystem, and modifying the DB when not doing the same operation is not a good idea - it will cause more problems than it's worth.

Side note: What if pacman used a (JUST FOR EXAMPLE, PLEASE DON'T ASK FOR THIS) mysql db or some other non FS implementation?
Comment by Glenn Matthys (RedShift) - Sunday, 19 August 2007, 17:49 GMT
I don't see the advantage, /var/lib/pacman is world-readable by default, why would a regular user want to write there? imho this can be closed.

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