What were you trying to do that didn't work?

A customer hit an issue with installing a kernel (which pushes files in /lib directory in particular), I was getting the following error message:

  Installing       : kernel-core-4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64                                                             1/2 
error: failed to open dir lib of /lib/: Not a directory

Error unpacking rpm package kernel-core-4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9.x86_64
[...]

After much digging, it was found that /lib exited and was the appropriate symlink to /usr/lib but /lib was owned by some non-root user.

The error message tends to indicate the errno of a previous C function was reused inadvertently.

Please provide the package NVR for which bug is seen:

rpm-libs-4.14.3-28.el8_9

How reproducible:

Always

Steps to reproduce

1. Change ownership of /lib symlink

   # useradd user
   # chown -h user /lib

2. Install a kernel

   # yum install kernel-core-4.18.0-513.18.1.el8_9

Expected results

Some self-explanatory error message

Actual results

Cryptic misleading message