Re: Alternatives in /bin (Was: Re: Bugs in bash (was: Release-critical Bugreport))
Hi,
On Sat, 29 May 1999, David Starner wrote:
> Alternatives is that it involves links to /etc, which may not be present if
> /etc is on a seperate partition and that partition isn't mounted (for
> example, in single user mode.) Losing /bin/sh under single user mode would
> be nasty.
Excuse me for my ignorance if I'm way off on this, but the idea of not
having /etc on the root partition sound just plain weird to me. What
about /etc/inittab? Isn't that supposed to be read by init before any
partition gets mounted on the root partition at all? Come to think of it,
what about /etc/fstab!? Have you ever done this in reality?
> One problem with the current use of alternatives is /bin/csh. With tcsh,
> this is a link to /etc/alternatives and then to /usr/bin/tcsh, bringing up
> the question of why it's in /bin, because it won't be there in almost any
> situation where the /bin /usr/bin split matters.
This does sound like it has a valid issue. Either tcsh must go into /bin
or csh must go into /usr/bin. Based on personal preferences, I'd put csh
into /usr/bin. Writing shell scripts in csh is considered a form of bad
taste by many (search for "c shell programming considered harmful" for
some arguments) and system-critical csh scripts are just plain wrong,
since csh is not an essential package and can be removed from the system
at will.
Cheers,
Joost
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