few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Fri Mar 28 07:03:20 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 13:40 -0400, David Mansfield wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 12:27 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > 
> > > The last part of your sentence is the key. /sbin and /usr/sbin exist to
> > > keep tools out of ordinary users' PATH.
> > > 
> > 
> > Which made sense when every machine was expected to have an 
> > administrator to do the complicated stuff for you,
Not at all. These things are supposed to be setup "automatically".

Ordinary users are not supposed to look into them rsp. should not even
have to know about them - Unless ... they want to explicitly have them,
i.e. to act as maintainers.

> > but fedora doesn't  ship one.
;)

> Or maybe it existed to keep path search times down for users who didn't
> need those extra programs there...
Yep, this also had been a point in the past when disk access had been
expensive, rsp. to work around filesystem limitations.

Nowadays it's simply a usability aspect: Don't molest clueless users
with tools in their $PATH they won't need rsp. which aren't useful to
them.

> Of course, we now have 3123 programs in /usr/bin on my F8 system.
And ...?

Ralf





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