Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to everyone's path in F10
David Cantrell
dcantrell at redhat.com
Wed Apr 23 22:30:31 UTC 2008
On Apr 23, 2008, at 11:43 AM, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 09:43 -1000, David Cantrell wrote:
>> - Complete elimination of sbin vs. bin dirs. Just put everything in
>> bin. This is probably a bad idea anyway, since it really shows bad
>> form. And who knows, we might have more than 32768 dentry's in bin
>> some day, and that would be bad for ext3.
>> - Picking the commands that make sense for non-root users and moving
>> them from sbin to bin (ifconfig and route, for instance). Isn't
>> that
>> why mount(8) lives in /bin anyway?
>
> A lot of this is dictated by the FHS.
That's true, it is.
> If we were to eliminate the
> sbin/bin distinction, we would definitely not be LSB compliant, and
> while this may have little value to Fedora, it definitely does for
> RHEL.
>
> Symlinks are fine, but we need to be very careful what we move/delete,
> to ensure that we're not breaking LSB. (Or, if we really want to do
> it,
> try to amend LSB/FHS)
Symlink farms end up making the system look like Solaris (/etc/
mount...come on guys, still?). LSB compliance for RHEL is important,
I agree.
Keeping the distinction between bin and sbin is ok, but if that
distinction is to mean anything, then non-root users should never care
about programs in sbin directories. The FHS states that /sbin and /
usr/sbin are for root-only commands. If we have programs in those
directories that are to be used by non-root users, I think we've
violated the FHS.
I would say that if the distinction between sbin and bin directories
is to remain, then we should fall in line with what the FHS says. /
sbin and /usr/sbin are for root-only commands, period. System
administration tools that are of interest to non-root users should go
in /bin or /usr/bin. Glancing at the LSB, I only see four commands
that explicitly say they should be in /sbin or /usr/sbin. The other
commands mentioned just say they have to be "available" on the system.
So, I think we should make more of these tools available to non-root
users, but I think modifying the default $PATH is the wrong way.
--
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Red Hat / Honolulu, HI
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