From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Opera/7.50 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en] Description of problem: Situation description: /usr mounted read-only, other mount points mounted read/write, some package (e.g. mypkg.rpm) installed (somewhere in /usr/...). If I try to uninstall mypkg.rpm (rpm -e mypkg.rpm), it finishes "successfully" (the package appears to be erased, rpm -q mypkg.rpm reports "not installed"), but package's files of course persist on the disk (mounted read-only). I think this behavior is a bug. If the files cannot be removed, the uninstallation process should fail. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.3.1-0.3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have /usr on a separate filesystem mounted read/write. 2. Install a RPM package which installs its files under /usr. 3. Mount /usr as read-only (e.g. mount -o remount,ro /usr). 4. Try to uninstall this package. Actual Results: 1. The "uninstalled" package appears to be erased. 2. Package's files are at their places under /usr. Expected Results: Uninstall will fail, reporting something like "Uninstall failed - cannot remove files placed on read-only filesystem". Additional info:
rpm does "best effort" erasure, attempts, prints erro in debugging spew, then continues. "best effort" is the better approach because install/upgrade are what people mostly use rpm for, not pure erasures.