tab completion less useful now, due to sbin in path

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 01:25:26AM -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
> The proper time to voice objections to this would have been there, 6
> weeks ago now.

Well, as I thought the discussion had been left before that meeting, fixing
the general problem of user-level commands in the wrong places was the
feature and it was going to be solved properly. The feature is called "sbin
sanity", and I'm 100% in support of that. The "ah, hell, just put everything
in the path and call that sane" change came as a surprise to me.


> 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

You're doing this because either 
 
 1) You're not used to using sudo for admin commands (and now sudo works
    right by default -- a change that predated )
 2) There's a few user-level commands in the wrong place.


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

So, again, this makes it clear to me that most people who are chiming in in
support of the path change haven't been paying attention. Arrgh. Like I
said, talk about bike painting!

I support a lot of new users too. That's why I've been concerned about this.

Tell the user "sudo ifconfig". It's better than having them "su -" and *does
the right thing the right way*. (Although arguably ifconfig is one of the
commands that could be moved to /bin -- it's one of the few tricky cases so
it's a bad example.)


> 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.

Or, maybe I've been working for years on getting into Fedora a better
solution that's better for new users and for heavy command-line users alike,
and am frustrated that it's been undermined.




> $ ping -f 192.168.1.1
[...]
> Following your reasoning, I propose we move ping to /sbin. Not a very
> sound course of reasoning, is it?

*rolls eyes*

Obviously your reasoning is not very sound. There's a CLEAR difference
between commands which can't or don't work at all without root, and those
which have additional features which work as root. Again, one of the easy
cases and we can both see where it belongs, so it's ridiculous to pick it as
an example.

-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect 
Cyberinfrastructure Labs
Computing & Information Technology 
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences