Incorrect order of /usr/bin and /usr/sbin in path

David Cantrell dcantrell at redhat.com
Tue May 6 14:06:29 UTC 2014


On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 09:45:38PM +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
> > And calling /usr/libexec "Fedora-only" is of course kind of
> > funny.
> 
> "libexec" is Fedora-only, no other major distro used it, not even LSB
> allowed it.
> 
> It makes no sense to ever have that, and the rest of the world
> realized that long ago.

libexec is from the GNU Coding Standards, which a lot of Linux-isms come
from:

    http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html

The rationale was always clear to me:  libexec is for storing executable
programs to be run by other programs rather than directly by users.

*Even* GNU violates this "standard" with the installation of /usr/lib/gcc
(among other things).

The FSSTND, FHS, and LSB never made mention of libexec.  They neither forbid
it nor explicitly required it, so it's like every other made up standard
that came along.  No one really cared enough to stop it because it didn't
matter.

I think the annoying thing is if you're typing out a path that includes
/usr/lib, you can't easily hit TAB to get in to lib.  And that's worth
fixing.

-- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Manager, Installer Engineering Team
Red Hat, Inc. | Westford, MA | EST5EDT


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