Re: Announcing apt-watch: a Gnome 2 panel applet to check for upgrades

[Matthew McGuire <gray@shadowglade.net>]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 07:21:41PM +0100, Emile van Bergen wrote:

> What part of the process requires root privileges, exactly? A mere check
> for updates ideally shouldn't change anything on your system, just
> queries the dpkg database and apt sources, so I see no theoretic reason
> for it to require a suid helper? That would also solve the
> authentication problem.
> 
> Unless dpkg even disallows read-only access to the database to non-root
> users. I wouldn't have a clue why it does that then, though.
> 
Every time I run apt-get update as a non root user I always get the 
following:

magus@malek:~$ apt-get update                   
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13 
Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the list directory


So there is a lock file setup of some kind that requires root. Sadly I 
am not adept enough to know the why or how of it.

HTH,

Matthew McGuire