On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 at 07:47, Andrew Gregory
Implementing --sysroot the lazy way with a simple chroot turned out to have a number of complications that significantly reduce its utility. I've been sitting on a patch to reimplement it by prefixing all configuration paths with the sysroot, but this raises the question of how we should handle paths provided on the command line. Using chroot meant that all paths, regardless of what they were or where they came from, would be interpreted relative to the sysroot. Switching to manually adjusting paths means that we have the option to change that.
I'm inclined to change pacman to use command line arguments/options as-is and have --sysroot just modify values from the config file. I think that's the friendlier option for users.
Fwiw this seems like a great idea. I think it also helps for clearer privilege separation, since one doesn't need to have the extra chroot requirements into the mix. Yes there's a chroot in libalpm, but it's very self-contained and clear. Hope it helps, -Emil