[pacman-dev] Lock file location

[Dan McGee]

On 6/11/07, Travis Willard <travis at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:40:15 -0400, Dan McGee wrote
> > 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.
>
> It sounds reasonable to me, but in the 10 minutes of thought I've given to it
> just now, I can't visualize a case where we wouldn't need to be root when the
> database needs to be locked anyway.  Locked DB generally means writing to DB,
> ie adding/removing pkgs, which requires root anyways.  Am I wrong?

I'm thinking outside of the box here. What if I, as a normal user,
want to install packages in a chroot environment? It would use a
separate pacman DB and separate root directory. In addition, the
biggest advantage is taking pacman and using it to install packages
elsewhere, such as on Dreamhost in my home directory.

-Dan