Directory structures in the future and other things I want.

[Ian Weller]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> I dont know if this is a thread hijack, but I felt this was a better
> name than the previous threads subject. If it is.. my apologies..
>
> My main 2 things I would like:
>
> 1) If we were to say get rid of /usr/bin, /bin, or /sbin etc.. Heck I
> wouldn't mind if it wasn't named something people could understand
> like: /SystemPrograms/ . I justwould like to see it come from a joint
> Linux taskforce so that it's not just yet another OS weirdness. I say
> this because I am currently having to rewrite my .profile to deal with
> our growing HP-UX, AIX, SuSE, Red Hat, Solaris, and CygWin
> environment. Everyone but Linux seems to stick things in weird spots
> or you are expected to know that you can't use /opt/bin/blah all the
> time because its a symlink and it breaks on this blah blah blah.
>
> 2) One thing that Jesse and Seth brought up was the one major RPM
> breakage that comes up every other release about why we can't do
> something really cool. And that is the problem with symlinks and I
> think directories. I would rather us do something really really
> radical like going to a package system that deals with that than
> moving items from /sbin, /usr/sbin/, /usr/myosrocks/sbin etc.
>
> 3) I think I will +1 Bills very clear fix: Just add /sbin:/usr/sbin to
> everyone's path. Deal with 1 and 2 after 9 is out the door, and
> probably shoot for it to be 11 earliest (or if we never go to 10 or
> 11.. whatever the next series is called :)).

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard [1] gives good reasons for a lot of
this... /bin is for essential command binaries, /usr/bin is for
nonessential command binaries, /sbin and /usr/sbin are for system
binaries.  I personally am a fan of the organization, but +1 to
the adding /sbin:/usr/sbin to everyone's path.

-- ian

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard