Jesse Keating wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:49:42 -0600 Douglas McClendon dmc.fedora@filteredperception.org wrote:
A while back on this list, I asked what parts of fedora required root privileges to be rebuilt. I.e. why you couldn't just rpmbuild --rebuild every last thing as a build user, never subjecting the build system to the impact of building as root. The answer seemed to come back that the only things that _really_ required root, were the creation of small filesystem-disk images. My tool qfakeroot provides a solution for that, and given the sizes of the images involved, will add but a few minutes to the rpmbuild--rebuild time.
Maybe I missed that, but every /rpm/ is buildable by non-root. It's when you start talking about /composing/ releases and Live images that root privs are needed (or enoug privs to make loopback devices).
I did miss that (had thought that the anaconda rpm was spinning some disk images). But my target was recompiling every line of fedora source code into a new fedora release (isos too), without requiring root privs. I.e. that was the itch I wanted to scratch, and so the distinction between rpms and compose tools doesn't change the issue for me.
Now, we could do something more sneaky and ship the livcd-creator and pungi python scripts setuid, but that's probably not what you're looking for.
Correct. Nor a magical hal/dbus/whatever service that exposes some root capabilities.
But again, I'm not suggesting that there aren't a few viable theoretical alternatives to the method I presented. Though I don't know of any that work already. But as you said, sure, you can just go suid and do whatever you want. I just am kind of proud of the fact that I can accomplish the task without root/suid.
Along with as described, the relative ease of doing a very small containered alternate-selinux policy set up. It sort of sounded to me like a useful solution for the selinux-chroot issues brought up in this thread.
I was disappointed googling and seeing your issues with qemu-ppc not being great for booting up full blown fedora-ppc. I too really hope that sees improvement soon.
-dmc