[arch-general] makepkg not working in chrooted environment

[Norbert Zeh]

Allan McRae [2010.10.22 1028 +1000]:
> makepkg uses pacman with the -T flag to test whether a package
> installed.  That is supposed to be dead quiet.  Of course if you
> used the --debug flag you would see the message you are after...

Fair enough.  In particular, I can see why printing an error message may
cause a mess, for example, in how makepkg uses pacman -T to list unmet
dependencies.  Nevertheless, if I'm a user (not a developer) who wonders
why pacman isn't doing the right thing, the copious output produced by
--debug isn't that helpful, especially because I have to infer from

"warning: pkgcache is NULL for db 'local'"

that pacman in fact cannot read the contents of /var/lib/pacman/local.
So, I still think that an informative error message such as

"warning: cannot access /var/lib/pacman/local"

would be immensely helpful from a user's perspective.  As I said, I see
why having such an error message produced by pacman -T is a bad idea,
but pacman -Qs, instead of outputting nothing, should produce a warning.

Cheers,
Norbert