On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 09:10:52 +0100 Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <jo...@debian.org> wrote:
> Quoting Glenn Washburn (2022-01-17 08:42:24) > > I'll restate my use case briefly here. The use case is installing packages > > as > > an unprivileged user to a user writable location (I don't have privileges on > > this machine and can't chroot). This can be done by invoking the dpkg binary > > with the "--force-script-chrootless" option and works, but the post install > > fails. > > And just as I told you in that other bug, you can achieve that same thing > without being root by using either fakechroot or by unsharing the user > namespace. But you definitely have privileges for the former. Chroot is a semantic I'e been trying to avoid because I'm wanting to use the main filesystem as much as possible (ie only install what's not already installed on the main system). I believe unprivileged overlayfs is what I want. I could use overlayfs in UML, but so far trying to avoid that as a dependency. I believe Ubuntu has a patch for this, but I don't think its been accepted to mainline yet. So here I am. > We don't need to put support allowing maintainer scripts to be run as another > user as the root user if there are mechanisms that can fake the root user. For > good reasons package maintainers are cautious when it's about increasing the > complexity of their maintainer scripts and it should only be done when it's > absolutely necessary. Yes, I've heard this before. Probably at a minimum this should be documented in the dpkg debian man page, perhaps under script-chrootless or DPKG_ROOT, noting that that not all distro packages honor this method of package install. > The final decision of course lies with the texinfo maintainers and not me. I'm > just explaining for you (again) why this is not needed. Just have a look at > the > mmdebstrap code and how it fakes being root to create chroot tarballs without > any root privileges. Take that code and use it for your own project and you > will not have to file another of these bugs as all packages will just > magically > work without any changes. If you need help understanding how mmdebstrap does > what it does I (again) offer you my help. Thank you Josch. I don't believe this can help me because of the afore mentioned issue with chroot. Am I mistaken? You can take this discussion off the bug list if you like. It seems to be venturing into irrelevant territory. Glenn
