Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to everyone's path in F10

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Apr 25 15:15:54 UTC 2008


max bianco wrote:
>>  If you want to control what people do, you don't give them the root
>> password.  But, the 'average' PC user is his own administrator, especially
>> for something like fedora which is way to high-maintenance for an
>> experienced administrator to choose to manage for everyone else, and he's
>> going to need to use the stuff whether it is hidden or not. The question is
>> whether you want to make it simple or make it confusing. You seem to want to
>> make it confusing just so everyone suffers as much as you did when learning
>> the arbitrary quirks of the distribution.
>>
>>
> Not so they suffer, so they learn. 

Learning how to fix the quirks of one or another particular distribution 
has a very limited value.  If you want someone to learn, you need to 
make it easy to find the tools that work the same across unix-like 
systems so they will learn the things that are more broadly useful. 
Remember the whole books of crap about how to work around problems in 
dos/win3.1/95/98 etc.,etc.?  You could have memorized them all and it 
would be worth nothing now.  Learning where some program lives on some 
version of some fast-changing linux distribution is the same sort of 
knowledge.  Not only will it be useless in the likely event that it 
changes in the near future, but there will be a point where it will be 
harmful that what you think you know is wrong.

 > If the users are advanced they can
> modify their profile to suit them,

Advanced users aren't the point when you create system defaults, but 
supplying a usable PATH won't hurt them either.

 > i am concerned that a newbie, and
> more and more are jumping on board, just like me, will inadvertently
> screw himself because accessing more advanced commands was to easy and
> did not come with a warning that an advanced user doesn't need ,
> because instead of forcing them to learn the quirks,

You can't 'force' someone to learn anything, you can just make them 
resent whoever created the stupid quirks in the first place.

> it was decided to
> hell with him the inconvenience caused to the advanced user, who can
> work around it but doesn't want to because he or she is too lazy, is
> too great.

You are making a very good argument for that user to find a different 
distribution if you are doing things just to make him work harder.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com






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