tab completion less useful now, due to sbin in path

[Jon Stanley]

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:

> Awesome. Accusing-people-of-bikeshed painting again. It's like tne Godwin's
> Law of Fedora Devel or something. You get to be all snarky sounding and
> dismissive at the same time. "Ooooh, the people who don't agree with me are
> BIKESHED PAINTING! Zing!"

I really don't think so.  This is painting the bike shed more than any
other thread in recent memory. I don't personally use the term that
often, and had been avoiding weighing in on this thread for precisely
that reason, but this has now gone too far. We already decided the
color of the bike shed, and it's blue. Reference below:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/SteeringCommittee/Meeting-20080820

The proper time to voice objections to this would have been there, 6
weeks ago now.

> So, if you insist on using the analogy: I'm sorry a buncha hooligans came
> and painted graffiti all over the bikeshed. I'd like to put it back to its
> former utilitarian finish even if it's a bit ugly, then from there you can
> argue about colors all you like while we slowly actually get it into shape.

Again, if you insist on using the analogy, then this particular
bikeshed is currently in good repair and very attractive.

To make it clear, I'm 110% in favor of this feature, as are a number
of people, Let me explain why.

1) I've been admin'ing Linux (and Solaris, in the interest of full
disclosure, and occasionally some AIX or HP-UX thrown in for good
measure) boxen in some form for about 10 years now.  One of the first
things that I do in my user profile is to put these exact directories
in my PATH. It makes my job easier. This particular reasoning is not
good enough

2) I support alot of newbie users. Let me try and explain this in a
format that everyone will understand:

<new_user> OMG, ifconfig doesn't work, it's not installed!
<helper> you have to be root to do that.
<new_user> I am
<helper> how did you obtain root?
<new_user> why, su of course!
<helper> you need to type su -
<new_user> why's that?
<helper> because 'su -' gives you a login shell
<new_user> but I'm already logged in, do I need to open another window
or something?
<helper> no, just trust me here
<new_user> all this Linux stuff is just too complicated
* new_user has quit: installing Vista

If you think that nearly this exact interaction doesn't happen on a
daily basis, feel free to join #fedora and I'm sure one of the nice
folks there will inform you (I see it in #rhel where I help out all
the time).

So yes, this feature is necessary in order to make the distro more
accessible to new users. For the small minority that don't agree with
this change, it's highly likely that you know what you're doing and
are using puppet or something similar, and can revert the change
locally with a trivial amount of effort.

In regard to the point in your second mail, are there commands that
only root can execute in those locations? Absolutely. Have I
personally ever entered a command that can only be executed as root as
a normal user? Almost daily. Simple enough to press the home key and
type sudo in front of them.

And to belabor the point even more, are there commands in the CURRENT
default path that can't be executed by normal users? You better
believe it! Following is from my F8 system:

$ ping -f 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
ping: cannot flood; minimal interval, allowed for user, is 200ms
$

Following your reasoning, I propose we move ping to /sbin. Not a very
sound course of reasoning, is it?