Feature request: run distrobuilder as a regular user

[inercia]

Users currently need to run distrobuilder with sudo for building images, I guess for having the right owner/permissions in the root fs. This makes it very unconvenient for integrating distrobuilder in automated environments or with other tools like Terraform.

I was wondering if it would be posssible to drop this requirement, maybe by unshareing some namespaces before starting the build...

[stgraber]

It's not possible as using unshare would only give you a single uid and gid to work with which won't work as rootfs always has files owned by multiple users.

If that was the only issue, something like fakeroot would probably work, but distrobuilder also needs to be able to create and use device nodes, configure and use loop devices and mount a variety of filesystems, none of which can be done by an unprivileged user.

I'm hoping that in the next few years we can get to the point where enough of this is possible in an unprivileged container to at least let us use that, but even for those we're still a long way away.