why doesn't installation setup /var/tmp/rpm?

[Suren Karapetyan]

Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Neal Becker wrote:
>
>> Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:08:02 -0500
>> From: Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com>
>> Reply-To: Development discussions related to Fedora
>>     <fedora-devel-list at redhat.com>
>> To: fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
>> Followup-To: gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel
>> Subject: Re: why doesn't installation setup /var/tmp/rpm?
>>
>> Panu Matilainen wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Neal Becker wrote:
>>>
>>>> Paul Howarth wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:13:26 -0500
>>>>> Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I always have to do
>>>>>> mkdir /var/tmp/rpm
>>>>>> chmod 1777 /var/tmp/rpm
>>>>>
>>>>> What's it needed for? I've never needed to do this.
>>>>>
>>>>> Paul.
>>>>>
>>>> If I don't then when I run yum I always get a flood of messages saying
>>>> 'unable to get backing store ...' or something like that.  This has 
>>>> been
>>>> true on every machine I've setup for Fedora for many releases back.
>>>
>>> Rpm doesn't use such directory for anything by default, and neither 
>>> does
>>> yum AFAIK. Most likely you have overridden %{_tmppath} (by default
>>> /var/tmp) somewhere and forgotten all about it.
>>>
>>>  - Panu -
>>>
>>
>> Ah, in MY .rpmmacros:
>> %_tmppath               /var/tmp/rpm
>>
>> But this is a bug!  yum (run as root) shouldn't be using MY .rpmmacros.
>
> if you did just "su"  to become root you still have your own user 
> environment.  you need to use "su -" to pick up roots environment.  of 
> course you really should not build rpms as root.
>
And that's exactly why many didn't want to have /sbin in user PATHs - 
cause it makes even harder for everyone (and especially new users) to 
understand what's the difference between "su" and "su -"