few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

[Steven Bakker]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 19:45 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> Are we 100% sure there is no collision between /bin and /sbin contents
> today ?

I don't see any on my F8 install, but I do see collisions on /usr/bin
and /sbin:

cluestix# cd /sbin; for f in *;do [ -e /usr/bin/$f ] && echo $f;done
halt
poweroff
reboot

These entries in /usr/bin are symlinks to "consolehelper".

There seems to be considerable overlap between /sbin and /usr/sbin, but
the overlap is either due to static vs. dynamic executables or because
the file in /usr/sbin is a symlink to the /sbin version.

As for /bin and /usr/bin: the overlap in files consists of symlinks
only. (Though interestingly enough, some links in /usr/bin are to
"../../bin/foo", some are of the form "/bin/foo"; to avoid surprises, we
should pick one or the other, and the relative path version is usually
preferred AFAIK.)

Except for "ex" (/bin/ex -> /bin/vi ; /usr/bin/ex -> /usr/bin/vim), it
is feasible to lump /bin and /usr/bin together (like Solaris does).

However, merging /usr/sbin and /sbin does not make much sense because of
the statically linked executables in /sbin (for which you will be
grateful if you accidentally hose libc.so).

Because of the consolehelper links in /usr/bin, you can either
merge /bin and /usr/bin OR /bin and /sbin, but not both. Given the
choice, I'd opt for /bin and /usr/bin.

As hard as it may be to believe, some of the reasoning behind design
decisions made some 30 years ago still holds validity today... ;-)

Cheers,
Steven (PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/sbin)