how to 'rip apart' a rpm.

[Tom H]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us> wrote:
> On Monday 17 May 2010 08:40:31 pm Ed Greshko wrote:
>> On 05/18/2010 09:09 AM, Tom H wrote:
>> > On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 7:49 PM, Rick Stevens <ricks at nerd.com> wrote:
>> >> On 05/17/2010 02:12 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> >>> Clarify here: I can do all that as the user. What I can't do, until
>> >>> somebody decides to fix mkinitrd, is to run it as the user. That is my
>> >>> specific bitch. And I think its perfectly valid. mkinitrd simply will
>> >>> not run for anybody but root.
>> >>
>> >> And this is a bad thing? I, for one, don't want some low-level user
>> >> installing a kernel on my machines. I don't want them installing
>> >> ANYTHING that's global.
>> >
>> > +1
>>
>> I get the feeling that Gene isn't talking about the actual installation
>> of the initrd image.  I think he is wondering why something like...
>>
>> mkinitrd /tmp/xxx 2.6.30.10-105.2.23.fc11.i686.PAE
>>
>> needs root privileges to run.   Is there anything inherently wrong is
>> expecting that to work?
>
> "dracut /tmp/test.img 2.6.33.3-85.fc13.x86_64" works just fine as an
> unprivileged user

I'll take your word for it although but in my F13 VM, neither mkinitrd
nor dracut can create an initramfs when run as an unpriviledged user -
which is exactly the behavior that I want.