Directory structures in the future and other things I want.

[Benjamin Kreuter]

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



-- 
Message sent on: Thu Mar 27 18:07:49 EDT 2008
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