On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 08:17:09PM -0700, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> At this point, I think it'd be worth revisiting, at the project level,
> the historical tradition of leaving the sbin directories out of non-root
> paths. Setting aside all the single user desktop and laptop systems,
> there are enough alternative ways to grant restricted root (file ACLs,
> etc), and to run in alternate filesystem namespaces (e.g. containers),
> that the functional distinctions that lead to the original directory
> split are probably applicable in a minority of situations these days.
Sure, and I often use /sbin/mke2fs on create file system images on
plain files and then corrupt them using /sbin/debugfs to create
regression tests for e2fsck, and I do all of this w/o being root. So
I have /sbin and /usr/sbin and /usr/local/sbin in my path. Along with
a whole bunch of other customizations in my dot files, of course.
But my usage is an edge case, and asking Debian to make changes to
global changes to the defaults for people like me was never something
I thought was justifiable. Ultimately, if we believe that someday
we'll have the year of the Linux Desktop, where the primary
applications used by users are things like Firefox, Open Office,
Tuxracer, etc., adding /sbin and /usr/sbin might not be doing those
users a favor --- and those of us who are more technical are perfectly
capable of customizing our dot files. (Heck, I just pull a git repo
into ~/dotfiles, and then run "make install" and I get a custom set of
my dotfiles for that installation. :-)
> This isn't something that I feel strongly about, though. Anybody who
> does should retitle this bug appropriately and reassign it to the
> 'general' pseudopackage, whereupon it can be discussed on debian-devel.
> Otherwise it should get tagged wontfix, unless someone thinks this is an
> appropriate change to introduce at the cloud image level (I would not
> agree with this).
I agree this should be a project-level decision, and not cloud-image
specific. I personally am against changing the default. That's
because if someone is installing Debian on student laptops / desktops
at an educational institution like MIT, most of those users really
don't need /sbin and /usr/sbin; Debian users include far more than
just system administrators, kernel developers, and devops types.
I don't feel very strongly about it, though, so if the project as a
whole thinks Debian should be optimized for technical users, it's not
something I'll lose any sleep over. I replace all of the default
dotfiles for myself, anyway. :-)
- Ted