Just thinking about this while changing some other stuff this morning (permissions checking by libalpm and pacman). Here is the current "default" situation: DB Path: /var/lib/pacman/<dbname> Lock file: /var/run/pacman.lck Remember that the lock file formerly resided in /tmp/, but that is not exactly a FHS-prescribed path. My proposal is this- when we create a lock file, it is for one purpose- to lock the database. Perhaps we should indicate this a bit better, and have one less path that needs to be manually configured, by simply making the lock file a part of the DB and generalizing the lock method to something that could eventually use any backend? In an extreme case, we could lock each individual DB seperately, but for now, a single lock file here: /var/lib/pacman/db.lck would seem to suffice. Is this acceptable to everyone? The benefit it gives us is if this location is writable, the DB is surely writable by the user running pacman, and we can remove the dependence on the pacman user being root. We will still need to do some permission checking on install/pre-install, but I'll think about that later. :) -Dan