Same comand names in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 10.08.15 11:50, Josh Stone (jistone at redhat.com) wrote:

> On 08/10/2015 11:12 AM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> > iproute has /usr/sbin/ss
> > stripesnoop has /usr/bin/ss
> > 
> > This causes problems: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1249328
> > 
> > It seems like we should have a policy prohibiting different programs with the
> > same command names being in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.  Thoughts?
> 
> Do emphasize *different* programs or packages, as there are legitimate
> self-contained cases -- /usr/bin/mock vs. /usr/sbin/mock for instance.

I would also say that this is hardly "legitimate", it's just wrong to
do this, and we should disallow this in Fedora.

Given that sbin is in $PATH for unprivileged users too the seperation
is really pointless, since it's now only the $PATH order which makes
this not explode.

Having the same binary doing different things in two places is just
confusing, opaque to the admin and also not compatible with other
distros (such as Arch for example, where sbin is just a compat symlink
to bin, or distros where the $PATH order differs). In fact, I am
pretty sure on Fedora we should get rid of sbin too, and turn it into
a proper symlink to bin. That way we could get rid of all the symlinks
from /sbin binaries to their /bin binaries for compat reasons and just
make everything compatible with everything.

Yes, mock should be fixed to not install two different things to the
two paths. It's really ugly from mock...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat