The strangeness called `sbin'

[Ed Schouten]

Hello Doug,

* Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org>, 20111110 23:08:
> On 11/10/2011 04:39, Ed Schouten wrote:
> > I suspect this email could be one of the last emails I'm sending before
> > one of you hire an assassin to get rid of me, but here it goes.
> 
> Au contraire, I think your work on improving the general quality of our
> code has earned you many many brownie points, so you're far from being
> run out of town on a rail. :)

Thanks. :-)

> This particular proposal though I personally am confused about, and I
> apologize if I missed something obvious, but what is the value of making
> this change? I've read the thread so far, and I understand that the
> hysterical raisins that prompted the creation of sbin may or may not
> still apply, but I haven't yet understood what we would gain by moving
> everything.

Simplicity. Right now we have binaries executed by users installed in
five different places. I give bachelor courses on (embedded)
Linux/FreeBSD systems administration and software development and
explaining to them why it is done this way is getting tiresome.

But the point is: there are quite some tools in */sbin that should be
moved to */bin. I can at least point out 15 of them. Moving these tools
around requires the same amount of effort as simply getting rid of sbin.
If I have to decide on which of these to work, I'd choose the latter,
because as far as I know, sbin has no reason to exist anyway.

Also, it probably causes even less of a burden on our users, because
`make installworld' will simply force them to migrate, while if we move
binaries around, we can only hope that the user runs `make delete-old'.

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