why doesn't installation setup /var/tmp/rpm?

[Dennis Gilmore]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Neal Becker wrote:

> Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:08:02 -0500
> From: Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Development discussions related to Fedora
>     <fedora-devel-list at redhat.com>
> To: fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> Followup-To: gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel
> Subject: Re: why doesn't installation setup /var/tmp/rpm?
> 
> Panu Matilainen wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Neal Becker wrote:
>>
>>> Paul Howarth wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:13:26 -0500
>>>> Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I always have to do
>>>>> mkdir /var/tmp/rpm
>>>>> chmod 1777 /var/tmp/rpm
>>>>
>>>> What's it needed for? I've never needed to do this.
>>>>
>>>> Paul.
>>>>
>>> If I don't then when I run yum I always get a flood of messages saying
>>> 'unable to get backing store ...' or something like that.  This has been
>>> true on every machine I've setup for Fedora for many releases back.
>>
>> Rpm doesn't use such directory for anything by default, and neither does
>> yum AFAIK. Most likely you have overridden %{_tmppath} (by default
>> /var/tmp) somewhere and forgotten all about it.
>>
>>  - Panu -
>>
>
> Ah, in MY .rpmmacros:
> %_tmppath               /var/tmp/rpm
>
> But this is a bug!  yum (run as root) shouldn't be using MY .rpmmacros.

if you did just "su"  to become root you still have your own user 
environment.  you need to use "su -" to pick up roots environment.  of 
course you really should not build rpms as root.

-- 
Dennis Gilmore