Bug#2091: creating packages requires root privileges

[richard@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk (Richard Kettlewell)]

>Package: dpkg
>
>To create a binary *.deb package, root privileges are required.  This
>is because you must create a complete directory structure with proper
>ownerships and permissions first, and then use dpkg-deb to create
>a package from it.
>
>But this should't really be necessary.  A tar file is a tar file, and
>you can set any permissions inside it if you can write to it.  The
>only thing that is necessary is a program to set permissions inside
>tar files.

This looks more like a suggestion than a bug report to me...

If you're creating a Debian package you need to be root on the system
you're going to install it on to test it.  Even if you're using some
shared environment in which you don't have root on the main
development machine, is it really that problematic to make the
`binary' target on the test machine?

However, I haven't tried to build Debian packages in that sort of
environment, so there may be gotchas I'm missing.

A tool which could adjust permissions and ownership of the contents of
a tar file shouldn't be hard to write; you'd still have to get the tar
file back into the deb archive, of course.

--
Richard Kettlewell  richard@uk.geeks.org  http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/