/var/lock/rpm/transaction not relocatable

[Christof Pintaske <Christof Pintaske sun com>]

Hi,

my name is Christof Pintaske, I'm employed by Sun Microsystems, working 
on OpenOffice.org in general, and specifically on deploying it as an rpm.

We face a problem with rpm 4.3.x in that the transaction locking does 
try to lock the file /var/lock/rpm/transaction regardless of the dbpath 
or any prefix. In fact rpmlock_new() from rpm/lib/rpmlock.c takes a 
"rootdir" as an argument, however RPMLOCK_FILE is not relocated to it.

That causes grieves on our side because we need to install rpms without 
root privileges. QA and development need to be able to install several 
private instances of the same product. To do so we relocate the rpm 
database (--dbpath) and the product (--prefix) to the users home 
directory. That worked fine with older versions of rpm but became an 
issue on Fedora core with rpm 4.3.1.

Is there any workaround ? Is this a known issue ?

I guess the transaction file should relocate to the rpm database 
directory, otherwise you could still face race conditions on, for 
example, a diskless client, when installing rpms from the server and 
from the client at the same time.

many thanks for your attention and best regards
Christof