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I find this behavior odd.
It would make sense if the package would be downloaded in the cache dir (/var/cache/pacman/pkg) where root permission is required but I ran the command like this:
$ pacman -Sw gnuchess --cachedir $HOME
error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root.
Maybe because I dual boot mint with arch and I'm used to aptitude / apt-get, which does not requires to be root for just downloading packages:
$ apt-get download gnuchess
Get:1 Downloading gnuchess 5.07-7 [93.6 kB]
Fetched 93.6 kB in 0s (290 kB/s)
$ aptitude download gnuchess-book
Get: 1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/universe gnuchess-book all 1.01-2 [2,591 kB]
Fetched 2,591 kB in 1s (1,419 kB/s)
Is this pacman behavior normal, for security reasons or something?... Because I simply don't get it.
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Hmm... we could probably check if the download folder is writable if doing only -Sw. File a bug report.
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Bug filed here.
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