Directories not owned by package

[Enrico Scholz]

Nicolas.Mailhot at laPoste.net (Nicolas Mailhot) writes:

>> The check is not to work around package bugs in Core and to own every
>> directory which a core package should include already
>
> This is a correctness thing. It came up on the list before - ideally rpm
> should auto-own all directories a package uses

No; this will solve the clean-uninstall problem only, but can cause
other, much more severe problems:

* when not owned, the current umask applies. With restrictive 077
  settings, package becomes unusable for ordinary users
* it will break symlinks; e.g. consider packages which are shipping
  a FHS compliant /etc/init.d/A and RHL style /etc/rc.d/init.d/B
  initscript. When ignoring directoriy ownership in the suggested
  way, you will end in two distinct directories '/etc/init.d' and
  '/etc/rc.d/init.d'. Later installation of chkconfig (which links
  /etc/init.d to /etc/rc.d/init.d) can not solve this.


Beside this there are informational issues too:

* on 'rpm -qf /usr' I do not want to see all packages having files there
* on 'rpm -qf /var/lib/foo' I want to see the package owning this
  (perhaps emtpy) dir.




Enrico