The strangeness called `sbin'

Doug Barton dougb at FreeBSD.org
Mon Nov 14 00:21:04 UTC 2011


On 11/13/2011 16:08, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2011, at 2:57 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
>>
>> Actually I think a much more interesting, and likely more useful change
>> would be to put everything into /bin. 
> 
> I'm really confused, Doug.
> 
> You've been vehemently arguing against merging /bin and
> /sbin, but here you seem to be claiming that it would be
> better to instead merge /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin.
> 
> Care to clarify?

Go back and reread the message that you quoted from, and hopefully it
will be clear to you. I'm not sure I can say it any better than I did.

> Personally, I really like Ed's proposal. 

Nothing stops you from implementing it locally. :)

> In part, that's
> from my personal experience of being highly annoyed
> whenever I use a Linux system that doesn't put /sbin into
> my path. 

Ed's proposal won't help you on Linux systems. OTOH, we've had */sbin in
the default path for many years, which means that relative to the cause
of your pain Ed's proposal provides no benefit on a FreeBSD system.

> If I always expect both /bin and /sbin to be in my
> path, then just combining them into one directory makes
> a whale of a lot of sense.
> 
> I agree the transition issues are delicate, but we've
> dealt with equally difficult transition issues before.

First, I think you are also dramatically underestimating the level of
drama that this is going to cause. Second, (and here's a hint to the
answer to your first question) given that there is so little (if any)
benefit, why create all the pain in the first place?


Doug

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