Stephen --
I understand what you are saying, but there are some issues with doing some
these things:
On Thursday 27 March 2008 17:57:18 Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
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.
The paths to programs are difficult to change, especially common paths
like /sbin or /usr/bin. Many programs would have to be changed in the
process (these paths are sometimes hardcoded, or just set as defaults because
they are so common). There is some progress in the direction of cleaning
this up with "/etc/alternatives," but the existence of these paths will
probably stick with us as a legacy of a forgotten era for a long time.
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.
I am not very knowledgeable about the nature and causes of package breakage
between major releases, but I can say that things have gotten a LOT better
since the days of FC5 (which is where I started with Fedora). The transition
from FC6 to F8 was very smooth for me, with only two hiccups. I expect that
these problems will vanish in the next year or so, judging by the progress
over the past few years.
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 :)).
This is not a good idea, because it means that users will either do something
not so smart (invoking superuser programs while not acting as a superuser) or
something not so secure (allowing non-superusers to invoke superuser
programs). Having /sbin and /usr/sbin in the superuser path should be left
up to the individual, as anyone who is experienced enough to administrate
their system from the command line will be experienced enough to add that to
their PATH on their own. I am not usually a fan of this line of reasoning,
but in this case, it does make sense.
As for your issue with having separate profiles for each system you have to
administrate...such is the nature of trying to administrate multiple systems,
as far as I can tell. POSIX doesn't define much about the userland paths on
different systems, and Freedesktop is really a Linux-centric movement (though
I would love to see it applied to other systems, where possible).
-- Benjamin Kreuter
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Message sent on: Thu Mar 27 18:07:49 EDT 2008