Re: Hurd FS hierarchy (was Re: LD_LIBRARY_PATH troubles)

[Jeroen Dekkers]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 06:13:39PM -0500, Richard Kreuter wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 11:35:36PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 02:49:21PM -0500, Richard Kreuter wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 07:42:56PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Yes, but I can't find a rationale for the /sbin directory.
> > > 
> > >   Maybe there isn't a good one.  (It seems to exist (in the FHS, at
> > > any rate) so that some commands will be out of the way for normal
> > > users.  Given the number of programs on a modern system, though, any
> > > command the user doesn't already know about is out of the way, in the
> > > sense that the user will only find it by chance.)
> > 
> > You mean they have to do "ls /sbin" or have to put sbin in there PATH
> > manually? Really, I don't think it's a good argument. Why do you want
> > to hide the binaries?
> 
>   Normal users under normal system circumstances don't need these
> binaries, and on other systems mostly can't use them.  If they are not
> useful and not usable, they might as well be omitted from the path
> directories.  

I don't think it's useful for about 20 binaries. There is more
unuseful crap in /bin I think.
 
> > I think the whole /sbin directory is old unix-craft like /usr. If you
> > move all binaries which can be useful as a normal user to /bin you
> > don't have much left. AFAICS both the FHS and the GCS allow symlinking
> > /sbin to /bin. Does anybody see a reason for not doing so?
> 
>   I don't want to defend the /sbin directory any more.  An
> administrator is welcome to modify their systems to his heart's
> content; we're working on integrating two existing sets of standards,
> right?  Throwing both out might have benefits, but that's not what
> we're discussing. To answer your question, I can see two: GNU
> standards compliance, and accordance with FHS rationale and
> motivation.

The rationale is just that, we are compliant. GCS doesn't say that
/sbin has to be a directory, only that programs should install things
in that directory.

Jeroen Dekkers
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