Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to everyone's path in F10

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 13:22 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 11:30 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > I propose that we add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the path for normal users
> > (as well as root) for F10? There are plenty of useful tools in there for
> > non-root users (ifconfig, fdisk, parted), and IMHO, any tool which
> > assumes the user is root because it lives in /sbin is fundamentally
> > broken. The LSB doesn't mandate this (at least, not anywhere I can see),
> > so I propose that we just do it.
> > 
> > Anyone opposed to such an action?
> 
> The tools in /sbin are divided into two categories:
> 
>   a) Those that are useful for non-root users, mostly in a
> query/reporting capacity.  Like ifconfig, lsmod, and fdisk (for -l),
> lspci, lsusb, ...
> 
>   b) Those that are not useful without root privileges.   Like modprobe,
> rmmod, insmod, fsck, swapoff, ...
> 
> 
> There are 3 ways to handle this issue:
> 
>   1) All of a) and b) in /sbin, and /sbin not in users' path.  This is
> the current setting.
> 
>   2) All of a) and b) in /sbin, and /sbin in users' path.  This is what
> you propose.
> 
>   3) Symlink all of a) into /bin (or symlink), but keep b) in /sbin and
> keep /sbin out of users' path.
> 
> 
> In an ideal world, we would have 3.  But it's a lot of packaging work.
> Failing that, there's near consensus that 2) is better than 1) as the
> set of commands in group a) seems to be larger than b).

The split /bin vs. /usr/bin is completely unrelated to the split between
*/bin vs. */bin.

/bin vs. /usr/bin is motivated by the FHS mandating /usr to be on a
filesystem of its own (and systems to be able to boot without /usr being
available), while the */bin vs. */sbin split is motivated by splitting
_system_ binaries off from ordinary users' $PATH.

Ralf