On 30/11/16 01:58, Andrew Gregory wrote: > pacman's --root option is regularly (mis)used to use pacman to manage > a mounted guest system, typically one whose pacman installation is > currently broken. We have a few configuration defaults in place to > make this sort of work, but support is incomplete. Those defaults > only actually take effect if the settings haven't been set in > a configuration file, several options still default to the host system > resources, and using the guest's pacman configuration requires > updating all configured paths to the new mounted location.
What use would the current --root option be after this is implemented? Is this just a bug that --root should already be working exactly like proposed new option? > Adding a --sysroot/--chroot option would allow pacman to properly > operate in a mounted guest system. At the moment, there are two ways > we could accomplish this: prefix all paths with the sysroot or just > call chroot(2). Obviously, the problem with chroot(2) is that it > requires special privileges. Unfortunately, I think my symbolic > user/group patch (https://patchwork.archlinux.org/patch/3694/) will > require chroot to work properly as I can't find any other way to look > up users/groups in a mounted guest. So, we may have to implement both > approaches so that regular users can perform queries but privileged > users can perform transactions with proper symbolic name support. Don't we already chroot when running the install scripts? Is this just a case of extending that chroot to the entire operation? Allan
