Does anyone know what's causing this annoying permissions warning popup after upgrading packages in synaptic? Been seeing this for several versions now, even tried changing permissions on the offending path, but it gets changed back.
It doesn't seem to cause any issues except requiring an extra click to close the popup, but this is getting annoying!

W: Can't drop privileges for downloading as file '/root/.synaptic/tmp//tmp_cl' couldn't be accessed by user '_apt'. - pkgAcquire::Run (13: Permission denied)

Here's the permissions:

$>cd /root/.synaptic
$>ls -l
...
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 26 20:51 tmp (which is empty)

I've never seen that warning.

google search:
Can't drop privileges for downloading as file '/root/.synaptic/tmp//tmp_cl'

Search results indicate same reported by some Mint and Ubuntu users.
What's the context? Are you running inside a virtual machine?
Wondering due to something I read here:
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1337419"
linktext was:"https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1337419"
====================================

skidoo, can you post the line in your / etc / passwd file for your"_apt" user (and it's group memberships)? It sounds like I need to create this low-privileged user.

Thanks,

Jim

no such user account on my system (and I didn't intend to suggest there should be such).
That exact link I pasted, it was one of several among the google search results that seemed to indicate problems might be specific to running within a vm

I'm not running any VMs, only"sudo synaptic &" from my user account terminal.

was going to write"should use gksu rather than sudo to launch gui programs with root permissions"
but I just tried it (sudo synaptic) and it didn't seem to make a difference in this case.

FWIW, I typically launch synaptic by pressing Alt+F2, typing"synaptic", ticking the RunAsRoot box, and click ok button.
Right now, I tested various ways

-- launch roxterm, issue"sudo synaptic" as the command
-- launch roxterm, issue"gksu synaptic" as the command
-- launch roxterm, issue"synaptic-pkexec" as the command
-- Alt+F2 launch roxterm AsRoot, then issue"synaptic" as the command
-- Alt+F2 launch roxterm AsRoot, then issue"synaptic-pkexec" as the command

Still, nothing I've tried produces the"Can't drop privileges for" message you're encountering.

specs here: antiX16, default (jessie) repository. All installed packages are up-to-date. synaptic is version 0.81.2

I'm a bit ahead of you - running rolling-testing/stretch and am at synaptic v0.83 & apt v1.2.14. Latest is v0.83-b1 & v1.3~rc2. I haven't upgraded to that one since it's"beta/release candidate". Pbm. started a few months ago and I've been thru a few upgrades (of synaptic/apt) since then, so don't recall when it started.

now that you mentioned it... not on this system, but during a vsido(?) liveboot testdrive a month or so ago, I did encounter some apt or synaptic weirdness. From visiting packages.debian.org and reading the changelogs, it seemed like no beneficial (to me) features have been added in the newer version of synaptic nor apt. So, at this point, can you downgrade those 2 packages? (Hmm, maybe"apt-utils" also, in case that's the cause of the annoying notice.)