Proposal: Discourage rpmbuild --sign

[Gene C.]

On Wednesday 31 December 2003 07:42, Warren Togami wrote:
> Proposal
> ========
> rpm-4.2.2 in rawhide and all future versions should discourage the use
> of rpmbuild --sign.  Perhaps this can be done effectively by adding a
> large and annoying warning message and 15 second delay.  Or disable it
> completely.  I don't care how, just discouragement should be done.

I disagree with your proposal.  One of the reasons I use Linux is that I 
dislike some company only permitting things to work "their way".

1.  Yes, rpmbuild should be run as a regular user rather than root ... both 
building and signing.  However, this is good practice and should not be 
implemented in rpm itself.  [Having the default SELinux configuration prevent 
this is another matter entirely].  I still remember how (many years ago) I 
needed to rebuild the XFree86 rpms ... and found out the hard way that it did 
not use Buildroot at that time.  This experience drove two points home -- do 
not run rpmbuild as root and make sure that Buildroot is used.

2.  Forcing the use of Buildroot is OK too.

3.  The default topdir should NOT be /usr/src/redhat unless some type of 
regular user ownership is established for that directory tree is established.

4.  Alan is absolutely correct that doing the install as root is just as 
dangerous (if not even more dangerous) than building as root or signing as 
root.
-- 
Gene