Bug 18770 – non root running of rpm is overly unhelpful

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Bug 18770 - non root running of rpm is overly unhelpful

Summary:	non root running of rpm is overly unhelpful

Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG

Aliases:	None

Product:	Red Hat Linux
Classification:	Retired
Component:	rpm (Show other bugs)
Sub Component:
Version:	7.0
Hardware:	i386 Linux

Priority	medium Severity medium
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Assigned To:	Jeff Johnson
QA Contact:	David Lawrence
Docs Contact:

URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:	FutureFeature

Depends On:
Blocks:
	Show dependency tree / graph

Reported:	2000-10-10 00:50 EDT by Idcmp
Modified:	2007-04-18 12:29 EDT (History)
CC List:	0 users

See Also:
Fixed In Version:
Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:
Story Points:	---
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-10-10 00:50:09 EDT
Type:	---
Regression:	---
Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---
CRM:
Verified Versions:
Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---
RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:

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Description Idcmp 2000-10-10 00:50:06 EDT

A frequent mistake I make, and have seen many others make, is to run rpm as
a non root user when doing installs.  Previously the error message was a
unhelp "unable to open rpm database".  Now the error message is a long
discourse about the possible need to upgrade my rpm database.

It would be nice if RPM did a simple check to see if the user was not uid 0
and prior to giving database migration instructions simply suggested I
become root first.

I'm willing to provide a patch if this would accelerated getting this
feature implemented.

Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2000-10-10 17:00:30 EDT

FWIW, the "long discourse" is all that prevents disaster when upgrading from
rpm-3.0.x to rpm-4.0.

If you want to attempt a patch, see dbiOpen() in lib/rpmdb.c. I'll be happy to
consider changes,
but, I warn you ahead of time, the change is much trickier than it looks. Please
reopen this
bug if you succeed with a patch. Meanwhile, since the "long discourse" is
necessary and
not otherwise harmful, I'm gonna close this report.

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