[pacman-dev] Lock file location

[Andrew Fyfe]

Dan McGee wrote:
> 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
> 
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Sounds like a good idea. How pacman locks the database is completely 
dependent on what backend is being used to it belongs with the rest of 
the backend code.

Andrew