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




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list