[arch-general] Location of the pacman database

[Tobias Hunger]

Hi Leonid,

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 10:42 PM, Leonid Isaev <lisaev at umail.iu.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 09:37:40PM +0200, Tobias Hunger wrote:
>> Well, I do not put the secret keyring into the images, so everything
>> should be fine.
>
> So, you never run pacman from within an image, or have sig. validation disabled
> in pacman.conf?

I never run pacman -S ever. /usr is read-only anyway, so it would fail
without remounting it first:-)

>> Pacman can still validate images, so everything is well.

> Do you mean packages in an image?

Yes. pacman -Qo, -Ql and co. are immensely useful.

>> Local installs are not possible anyway.
>
> What's a local install?

Sorry, I meant "pacman -S whatever".

> I mean, if you treat images atomically, why do you need pacman (and associated
> DB) at all? You should have it only on the buildhost that generates the images
> (I couldn't find details in your previous emails in this thread).

Yes, I *could* strip the package DB. I could also strip lots of other
things that make no sense, but then I am not pressed for disk space.

So I prefer keeping the convenience of keeping pacman around. It is so
nice to be able to do a quick check which version of the packages are
installed, which package a file belongs to, etc.

> But those do not usually provide sane defaults, e.g. smartd.conf, dnsmasq.conf,
> syslog-ng.conf, wpa_supplicant.conf, and must be edited anyway.

True.

I just copy /etc over to /usr/lib/factory/etc on the buildhost and
then make sure the /etc on the host gets wiped during early boot and
replaced with the contents of /usr/lib/factory/etc.

Yes, I have a pretty special use-case. It works already, so arch is
flexible enough to accommodate even wierdos like me. It would still be
nice to get some of the hard things I had to configure around into
arch to make things easier for other wierdos;-)

Best Regards,
Tobias