Re: Proposal: rpm-4.2.2 should refuse to build as root

[Josko Plazonic <plazonic Math Princeton EDU>]

Warren Togami wrote:

> This would go a long way toward discouraging the improper and 
> sometimes dangerous practice of building RPMS as root. 


What could help (I think a lot) is to have a sane default for %_topdir 
(and some other rpm macros like %_gpg_path).  Add also a script 
preparing user build environment and/or more verbose error reporting by 
rpm commands that care about %_topdir (when it's not there to help users 
get going - though errors are probably verbose enough already for 
most).  Or just get rpmbuild (or rpm -Uhv src.rpm) to ask if it is ok to 
create %_topdir/{SOURCES,....}. 

E.g. (lame example that doesn't take in account root user, 
/usr/src/redhat and many other things):
%_home_dir %(echo $HOME)
%_topdir %{_home_dir}/src

After all, I think most people begin building rpms by rebuilding or 
modifying src rpms from others.  If they can do that as themselves (out 
of the box) they are likely to stay away from root account.

Josko P.