Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:
Since we are not shipping any remote with RHEL by default so far, every RHEL9 installation has empty /var/lib/flatpak.

This causes 2 kinds of issues:

1. Every start of gnome-software greets users with error message:
Sorry, Something went wrong:
error: Creating repo: mkdirat: Permission denied

2. The same error is preventing users to make operation with added --user remotes:
$ flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak remote-info flathub 
error: Creating repo: mkdirat: Permission denied
$ flatpak remote-ls flathub 
error: Creating repo: mkdirat: Permission denied
$ flatpak remote-delete flathub
error: Creating repo: mkdirat: Permission denied
   
Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
flatpak-1.10.2-4.el9.x86_64

How reproducible:
always

Additional info:
I reproduced this with Fedora 35 (https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4111#issuecomment-878226675) as well. 

As mentioned in upstream issue running "# flatpak repair" populates /var/lib/flatpak and solves the situation.

*** Bug 2003810 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 2057584 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

It looks like this is only triggered when the 'repo' subfolder is missing.
Two short term workarounds available:
- Do not create /var/lib/flatpak by default
- Create /var/lib/flatpak/repo by default

This is https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4111, fixed by https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/4732 (from https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/releases/tag/1.13.1).

Merge request: https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/flatpak/-/merge_requests/13

Built flatpak-1.12.5-2.el9_0:
https://brewweb.engineering.redhat.com/brew/taskinfo?taskID=43719286

flatpak-1.12.5-2.el9_0.x86_64

1. I tried both reproducers in the bug Description and the error message is no longer there.

2. Removing contents of /var/lib/flatpak/ does not cause the error message to occur.

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory (new packages: flatpak), and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2022:2334