FESCo Meeting Summary for 2007-02-08

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 11:48 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:44:21 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2007-02-15 at 05:30 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > For the record: 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > My issue is: IMO, the default settings rpmbuild uses, must be safe
> > > against arbitrary users running rpmbuild in a multi user environment.
> > > [...]
> > 
> > Just to also mention that (for the record) that the scenario you mention
> > here has happened in real life for me and a colleague. Without knowing,
> > we were building the same SRPM on a test-build machine separately, and
> > things got really weird. My colleague spent quite a while trying to fix
> > the problem from her side, because she didn't know the possible problem
> > with the build root. It was a core package.
> 
> Funny.

Not funny - Limitations/defects/bugs in rpm.

We actually are playing with symptoms, because nobody wants to fix the
cause.

>  Because by default you can only build as superuser, since it
> needs write-access to /usr/src/redhat/. As soon as you set up a
> local ~/.rpmmacros, you can define %_buildroot and point it to
> a private location. Problem solved. For example:
> 
> %_topdir    %(echo $HOME)/tmp/rpm
> %_tmppath   %{_topdir}/tmp
> %_buildroot %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-root

Yes, this is the traditional argument against using a fixed buildroot.
(IIRC, Thias or Axel came up with it, when this topic came up ca 1/2 a
year ago).

Ralf