Frakenyum LIVES!

 

For those of you following along. I'm 99.98% sure I have got a solution.
Thanks for all your help. 

The interesting part is that for reading the rpm database the yum
$installroot argument seems to be respected. For the install, the
argument does not seem to be respected for *all* files. Name and
Packages seem to get updated in $installroot but the rest (Sigmd5,
Requirename, Provideversion, etc) drop db4 error (13) permission denied
errors.

I can drop an .rpmmacro file in the home dir of the user/installer to
set the _dbpath to fix the write issue for rpm 4.2.3 and yum 2.0.8.

Is there a version combination of yum and rpm in which the rpm layer
(rpmmodule.so -> librpmdb-4.2.so) always respects the $installroot? That
is, reading nevral info for trancaction sets AND for installing?

Thanks again