I see that this bug was forwarded upstream as the following bug report: > Command "rpm -qp hello-1.0-1.i386.rpm" with not /var/lib/rpm/Name results in > writing to file or with an error message if user does not have privileges to > do > that. Is it really necessary access this database on querying package?
However, that is not true. If the Name database exists, rpm -qp does not complain when run as a normal user who cannot write to it. It only complains when the Name database does not exist. Which, I suspect, only happens on a system that is not a native rpm based system. So, I think that upstream is going to ignore this bug report; it's innaccurate, and doesn't affect their goals. However, it makes running alien as non-root on Debian a nasty experience, and so I strongly want it to be fixed here. 180 days with alien griping at every user who uses it is rather too long. I see that /var/lib/rpm/ is populated anyway when the rpm package is installed, so why not just create the name database at the same time? One way, probably not the best one, is to copy the Packages file to Name. Better would be for rpm --initdb to create the Name database. -- see shy jo
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