FS#8930 - pacman -Sup : you cannot perform this operation unless you are root + more general feature request

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Nagy Gabor (combo) - Friday, 14 December 2007, 23:02 GMT
Last edited by Aaron Griffin (phrakture) - Friday, 14 December 2007, 23:24 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category General
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version git
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Well, I hope this is not a duplicated task, I've read this somewhere, but I cannot find it now.

I've told everything in the subject. I would like to present here a possible solution, I hope this won't be off here:

I would like to ask more: simply remove this "are you root?" thing from pacman:
1. for example dpkg doesn't do this check neither (<- dpkg is not as good as pacman, but that is not bad neither;-), so this probably "works".
2. this leads some annoying bugs (like this)
3. this is a not a security protection at all: if "evil user" wants to install something, he can simply compile and use a no-root-check patched pacman, or do terrible things in /var/lib/pacman by hand, IF your system is weak (i.e. he has the required file/dir _permissions_) -- pacman is just a little "helper utility".
4. our code would be a bit cleaner
[Imho the only "acceptable" reason for doing non-root check: we cannot rollback transactions now (for example, ngaba user can write /opt on my machine), and this helps us avoiding some pacman created spam on HDD, but]
5. all transactions start with db lock, non-root user shouldn't be able to do this
6. well, why don't we let non-root users to "play" with pacman, someone may want to create a database in his home directory, or install packages to his pendrive (not really real life examples, but why not?)
This task depends upon

Closed by  Aaron Griffin (phrakture)
Friday, 14 December 2007, 23:24 GMT
Reason for closing:  Duplicate
Additional comments about closing:  Dupe of #8905,
please one report per bug or FR. Mixing them like this is just confusing

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