Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 83822
chroot and LD_PRELOAD don't mix...
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:50:56 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: When "rpm" is run with the "-root ..." option to install stuff on an alternative root, scripts (pre-install, post-install, etc.) are run in a chroot() environment. Unfortunately, if the user had the LD_PRELOAD environment variable set, this variable is propagated to the scripts, and they fail to run because the library cannot (usually) be found in the chroot environment. I believe that rpm should, when doing chroot(), unset environment variables that are counter-productive in a chroot. LD_PRELOAD is the most obvious (it bit one of my coworkers!), but unsetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH, SHELL, and perhaps even all environment variables (!) should be considered.
rpm changes the environment as little as possible, and that's probably wiseset, as there's always going to be one more enviroment variable that needs fiddling. There's no objective basis for whether LD_PRELOAD is useful in a chroot. For some, it is, for others it's not. Without objective criteria, filtering the environment doesn't belong in rpm.