[MPlayer-users] sorry for asking this

[Dominik Mierzejewski]

On Saturday, 10 August 2002, Sylvain Petreolle wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> This is necessary, because rpm must have access to the /usr/src/redhat 
> directory, which is for root only by design.

Properly configured rpm doesn't need access to that dir. That's equivalent
to my saying that RH's rpm isn't well configured by default.
See rpm-list archives for examples of non-root build rpm setup.

> As you say, root privs are needed to install packages.
> And that's what it does. It installs the src package, then compiles it,
> and finally transform it into a binary rpm.

It installs it in %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-root or something
like that and %_tmppath is /var/tmp by default, where everyone has
write access. So, no root privs needed here. The only problem is when
you build packages which do 'mknod', but that's different story.

-- 
MPlayer RPMs maintainer: http://www.piorunek.pl/~dominik/linux/pkgs/mplayer/
"The Universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are easy."
        -- Sheridan to Garibaldi in Babylon 5:"The Geometry of Shadows"