[pacman-dev] [PATCH WIP] Allow pacman to be run as a non-root user

[Allan McRae]

On 04/03/14 10:19, William Giokas wrote:
> In order to run pacman as a non-root user to install packages to
> non-system (somewhere in $HOME or something) it was required to fake
> your root status using fakeroot. This allows users to specify a config
> directive, `NoRoot` to tell pacman that it should not check for root
> privileges.
> 
> There is also an option in makepkg to allow it to not use root, as
> otherwise it will call 'sudo' or 'su' when using pacman to install or
> remove installed packages.
> ---
> 
> WIP. I'm intending to use pacman and makepkg as a manager for some game mods,
> and this was the only thing really holding it back. I had done some tests using
> fakeroot and other ways of getting around these checks, but this is something
> that I thought should really go into pacman. Will allow even more people to use
> things like pacman and PKGBUILDs for other things, like games and user packages.
> Might also let us do some testing without having to fake root.
> 
> Because WIP I haven't added docs yet. Just thought I'd get someone to look this
> over because I generally don't code in C, and it probably is disgusting. It's
> really just a carbon copy of the checkspace stuff, except in util.c.
> 
> Thanks for looking it over, and sorry in advance for it being horrible.
> 
> Bill Giokas (kaictl)
> 

<snip>

> diff --git a/src/pacman/util.c b/src/pacman/util.c
> index d42e27b..d10bc7d 100644
> --- a/src/pacman/util.c
> +++ b/src/pacman/util.c
> @@ -102,6 +102,9 @@ int trans_release(void)
>  
>  int needs_root(void)
>  {
> +	if(config->noroot == 1) {
> +		return 0;
> +	}
>  	switch(config->op) {
>  		case PM_OP_DATABASE:
>  			return 1;
> 

pacman -S --noroot glibc   ->   BOOM!

Well, boom being pacman errors out during package extraction.  At a
minimum, I would expect pacman to check whether I can write to all the
directories in the package file.

The database directory should only ever be writeable by root.  It would
be a major security issue otherwise (particularly as one promenant
distribution can still not sign databases...).  So how would a user of
"--noroot" add a database?   If we are restricting them to -U, there is
no need for makepkg support.

In conclusion, I'd like to see a very well thought out plan discussed
before I look at code for this.

Allan