Too many unowned directories

[Hans de Goede]

Florian Festi wrote:
> Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

<snip>

>> I don't know if you agree with me, but I think the _right_ way to
>> solve this is once in RPM, not 48235 times over in all the packages in
>> Fedora.  Even if the RPM implementation is a bit tricky, it's surely
>> easier than pushing this job down to every packager.
> 
> As far as I can see right now there is only one thing that RPM could do:
> Create a file requires to all directories that the packages places files 
> in and is not part of the package itself. From my (RPM) perspective this 
> is a good, save and simple to implement solution. But it comes with the 
> price of yum requiring (and though downloading) the file list for each 
> and every transaction. So you solve one problem by creating a new one. 
> Of course this new problem can surly also be solved by:
> 
> 
<snip>

> 
> PS: If someone knows better solutions feel free to discuss them here or 
> on rpm-maint at lists.rpm.org
> 

What about Panu's suggestion to just abort the install when trying to install a 
file in to a non-existing directory, instead of creating the dir on the fly.

This will not catch all cases, but will catch a lot, and is really easy to 
implement (I think).

We could even complement this by also refusing to remove a package if *owned* 
files are still left in a dir which it owns (and no other packages own). Then 
we catch all error cases AFAIK.

This means people will still need to manually get directory ownership right, 
but if their just build rpm fails to install they will learn soon enough!

Regards,

Hans