Re: root use of yum (given "umask 077") causes build trouble

James Antill wrote:
> Jim Meyering <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> FYI,
>>
>> [cc'ing the yum list, because yum may want to make the permissions
>>  of certain files it creates be independent of root's umask ]
>>
>> When I do things as root, I have umask set to 077.
>> That appears to have led yum to set the permissions on all files in
>> /var/lib/yum/rpmdb-indexes/ to -rw-------.
>> That in turn makes commands run by non-root like "yum info libvirt" fail,
>> and it also makes libguestfs' build process fail like this:
>>
>>     febootstrap: external python program failed, see earlier error messages
>>
>> The previous error it's referring to appears to be this:
>>
>>     IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '//var/lib/yum/rpmdb-indexes/version'
>>
>> I've just run this command (as root),
>>
>>     chmod go+r /var/lib/yum/rpmdb-indexes/*
>>
>> the libguestfs build was finally able to complete.
>> And "yum info ..." became usable again.
>>
>> This is on Fedora 15.
>
>  Note that I _think_ both sides of this are fixed in 3.4.0, but
> testing by anyone crazy enough to have a non-default umask is always
> good :).

Thanks, James.

I've just run this on a rawhide system:
  koji download-build yum-3.4.0-1.fc16
then this to install the 3 .rpm files:
  yum install yum-*

To test it, I set the permissions:
  chmod go+r /var/lib/yum/rpmdb-indexes/*
then ran this (with my usual umask of 077):
  yum upgrade --skip-broken
It didn't install anything (but did report dependency problems with
many boost-* js, js-devel, openbios-common packages), but did change
the permissions:

  $ ls -l /var/lib/yum/rpmdb-indexes
  total 152
  -rw-rw-rw-. 1 root root   2878 Apr 16 00:07 conflicts
  -rw-r--r--. 1 root root  40862 Apr 16 00:06 file-requires
  -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 106402 Apr 16 00:06 pkgtups-checksums
  -rw-r--r--. 1 root root     45 Apr 16 00:06 version

Oops.  Now "conflicts" is world writable.