Re: ownership/permissions of cpio initrd

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>]

> It appears to not be standard with fedora for sure... but while it origiginally
> was/is a Debian package it looks like there is source if you'd like to build it
> on other systems.  It was originally designed to tackle the exact problem you
> are confronting.
>
> See:
> http://freshmeat.net/projects/fakeroot/
>
> About:
> Fakeroot runs a command in an environment were it appears to have root
> privileges for file manipulation, by setting LD_PRELOAD to a library with
> alternative versions of getuid(), stat(), etc. This is useful for allowing
> users to create archives (tar, ar, .deb .rpm etc.) with files in them with root
> permissions/ownership. Without fakeroot one would have to have root privileges
> to create the constituent files of the archives with the correct permissions
> and ownership, and then pack them up, or one would have to construct the
> archives directly, without using the archiver.

Ugh that sounds even more than a hack. At least for one-user 
archives, I guess nobody at Debian knows that tar has a --user and 
--group option.


	-`J'
--