Bug 16610

Summary:	rpm overly cautious when building
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	djschaap
Component:	rpm	Assignee:	Jeff Johnson <jbj>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.2
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-08-19 22:18:40 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description djschaap 2000-08-19 22:18:39 UTC

rpm -ba file.spec returns:

Bad owner/group: /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/file-1.1-1.tar.gz

Changing ownership of this file to "root" eliminates this problem; however,
after the compile phase, rpm bombs out again with a similar error due to
the spec file being owned by non-root (me).  I prefer to keep SPEC files
for custom packages I produce in a CVS repository accessed with my personal
username.

Previously, I was able to "chown -R g+w /usr/src/redhat" and then "rpm
--rebuild" source RPMs without having to be root.  This change makes it
unnecessarily complicated to rebuild source RPMs as a non-root user.

I believe this change happened somewhere between 3.0.3 and 3.0.5, but not
sure.  Is there a way to change this behavior (ie, eliminate these security
checks)?

Thanks.

Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 2000-08-19 22:20:04 UTC

It's returning bad owner/group because it can't
resolve the uid that owns the files. It implies that
they are owned by a user not in /etc/passwd or in NIS/LDAP/whatever.

Check your nsswitch setup.

Comment 2 djschaap 2000-08-19 22:42:16 UTC

Thanks for the quick response!  That's what it looked like to me as well,
except...

- I am able to login in to the system just fine.
- "ls -l" properly resolves both the user & group.

I am running with NIS, using "passwd: compat" in /etc/nsswitch.conf.  I am using
"+@my_nis_net_grp::::::" as the last line in /etc/passwd.  Strangely enough,
adding "+::::::/bin/false" after that line fixes the problem with rpm building.

Because rpm is the only program I've had a problem with, I would suspect this to
be a problem within rpm, but not being familiar with the code I can't say for
sure.

I'm leaving this bug report RESOLVED since I've now got a workaround, though
there *may* still be an issue here.

Thanks!