The strangeness called `sbin'

[Ed Schouten]

Hello Warner,

* Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>, 20111110 18:38:
> I'd honestly start small here with (1) move the ones that are
> obviously wrong (and aren't specified by posix to be wrong). (2) make
> it an option to just make one or two binaries directories with compat
> symlinks (because there's a ton of scripts that just know where
> binaries life).

POSIX doesn't care about specific pathnames that much. According to the
spec, only /, /dev, /dev/{console,null,tty} and /tmp are reserved. The
rest can be arranged the way you like.

The problem is that both proposals (being mine vs. the first option you
mentioned) have regressions in some way or another:

- Merging sbin with bin may potentially make stuff slower, because of
  redundant PATH lookups, under the assumption that people don't update
  their PATH.

- Moving utilities from /usr/sbin to /usr/bin and vice versa can
  potentially cause even more breakage, since 3rd party applications
  may depend on their location. Even worse: if people don't properly run
  `make delete-old', they end up having multiple versions of the binary
  installed on their system.

A few symlinks here and there isn't that bad. If we just make sure our
base system can eventually work without them, most embedded systems can
do so as well.

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/
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