Description of problem:

The problem occurred when our customer tried to upgrade the "filesystem" package on a setup where /home is NFS mounted without no_root_squash option.

rpm (via cpio) tried to replace the /home directory but failed to chown() the directory and therfore failed to upgrade the package.

While this sounds the right thing to do in the common case (ie fail if the directory/file cannot be upgraded), rpm could avoid that problem by checking first if the file (or directory) to be written is identical to the one in the cpio archive.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

rpm-4.4.2-48.el5

How reproducible:

100% reproducible

Steps to Reproduce:
1. mount /home via NFS without the "no_root_squash" option
2. rpm -Uvh filesystem*.rpm
  
Actual results:

error: unpacking of archive failed on file /home: cpio: chown failed - Operation not permitted

Expected results:

rpm does not try to replace the directory if it has the same flags/modes/uid/gid

Additional info: