[pacman-dev] little bug with pacman and root

[wael at siemens-mobiles.org]

Hi,

Let's consider the following setup:
I have a distribution (any distribution it doesn't matter) installed on /
where am looking to install arch or frugalware on a chroot from it, So
pacman has been extracted to / and pacman.static is used... let's suppose
/arch is the chroot...

As i always install and upgrade I keep the pacman cache in /home partition
under /home/cache/pacman and create a symlink ( /var/cache/pacman ->
/home/cache/pacman ), so for instance /arch/var/cache/pacman is a symlink
to /home/cache/pacman (I know the link is broken but that's the idea), Now
I run
pacman.static -Sy -r /arch bash db binutils kernel26

Of course pacman will begin by saying, /arch/var/cache/pacman does not
exist... creating it (since the symlink is broken) but it also fails to
create it, so pacman decides to use /tmp and here it is all messed up, it
start downloading packages to /arch/tmp and it fails on checking packages
integrity it seems it is trying to do that on /tmp instead of /arch/tmp..

Regards,
Wael Nasreddine