Directory structures in the future and other things I want.

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Mar 28 17:04:59 UTC 2008


David Mansfield wrote:
> >> in the right order:
>>
>> /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin.
> 
> Are you aware that that is not the same root's path, and the whole idea
> was to take away the distinction of 'this program works like foo if I am
> root, but bar if I'm a user'...  And also, the 'su -' works and 'su'
> doesn't problem.  And the path with 'su -' is:
> 
> (some kerberos etc. garbage stripped out):
> 
> /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
> 
> It seems like your suggestion at least has the following problems:
> 
> * /usr/local/[s]bin needs to come before anything
> * the 's' variants should come before the non-s variants
> * console-helper should be fixed if it's so broken as to require the
> path order to be different for different classes of users to work
> properly, or simply, have console-helper drop the /usr/sbin component
> and move it to /usr/libexec which is the normal convention.
> 
> The first point is definitely true, the second two are only possible
> true ;-)

I still think all reasons for having a separate /sbin are obsolete and 
at some future point in new installations it would be better to replace 
it with a symlink pointing to /bin (noting that this can't be done 
cleanly at runtime in an update).  That means that any packages that are 
currently symlinked into to both should be fixed to not care if the link 
fails and any behavior differences between same-named programs depending 
on their location should be fixed (unless someone still thinks that 
surprises depending on whether you used "su" or "su -" are a good 
learning experience).  Meanwhile, changing the default user path fixes 
the worst parts of the problem.  But then there is the alias business 
too...  Should someone who normally uses "su -" but forgets and does 
"su" be surprised to learn that rm really doesn't ask if you meant to do 
that?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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