From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031015 Firebird/0.7 Description of problem: When attempting to install / erase / upgrade packages as a non root user, users get the following feedback: error: cannot get exclusive lock on /var/lib/rpm/Packages error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Operation not permitted (1) error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm Could the error message be made more explicit, specifically mentioning the users need to be root to perform the action? I run Red hat training courses and a lot of otherwise sharp students get confused by the current, unclear error message. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Attempt to install / upgrade / erase a package as a non root user Additional info:
It is possible for users to have local rpmdb's for testing/or in a chroot, etc: rpm --dbpath ~/rpmdb -qa rpm --dbpath ~/rpmdb --justdb -ivh rpm/RPMS/dummy-1.0-1.i386.rpm Preparing... ########################################### [100%] rpm --dbpath ~/rpmdb -qa dummy-1.0-1.i386 rpm --dbpath ~/rpmdb --justdb -e dummy The permission message is thus probably as specific as we can get.