[pacman-dev] Breaking change in pacman from 5.0.1 -> 5.0.2 with regards to user account resolution

[Thomas Karlsson]

Hello!

I have several packages that install files that need to be owned by specific users on the target system. To achieve that I'm using the install command with the -o <username> and -g <group name> flags in the package() function. I'm not using a install script with a post_install() function.

Example of the relevant part of the package function

package() {
  install -m 600 -o username -g groupname the_file "$pkgdir"/some/path/to/the_file
}

The package is built on a build server and then installed on a number of targets. This has worked fine up until I upgraded to 5.0.2

After upgrading pacman to 5.0.2 the file does not get the correct owner on the target system any more. It gets own by the user that has the UID that the user has on the build server which is not the same UID as the user has on the target.

To clarify. In my setup the UID of the user is different on the build server compared to the UID of the target system. Before this did not matter. The file got the correct ownership anyway. After 5.0.2 the file gets owned by whatever user account that has the UID and GID that the user has on the build server no matter what UID and GID the user has on the target system.

As far as I can tell this is probably the commit that changed the behavior
https://git.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?h=release/5.0.x&id=908769b54002e104b90ab2b3e5ca8066affd4394


Temporarily I have changed my PKGBUILD file to specify UID and GID that the target system has instead of the username and groupname on the install command but this seems fragile as it now requires that the UID/GID is the same on all target systems. Both existing and future.

Is this an unintended side effect of the commit referenced above, or is this the expected behavior?

Best regards,
Thomas Karlsson