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Re: /etc/profile should include sbin in PATH






On Thu, Jan 06, 2000 at 11:59:18PM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:
|
|Julian Stoev <j.h.stoev@ieee.org> writes:
|
|> For users who don't know how to do do this, it's better not to have /sbin
|> and /usr/sbin in the path.
|
|Why?! The only rationale anybody has proposed for why this would be better is
|that users wouldn't be confused by completions listing these programs. I think
|it's obvious that it's a) ludicrous b) more confusing to not have programs you
|expect in your path and c) a bad reason to be organizing the filesystem.

Well, if we were creating the OS and UNIX *now*, probably a lot of things 
can be done better. Think about SUID thing. It is bad and many people say 
this. But the world has other work to do. And if we risk to break some
things by "improving", it may be better to avoid revolutions. In control 
engineering something like this is called "minimum variance control"....:)

|The FHS explains the motivation that users be able to survive without /sbin or
|/usr/sbin in their path. It does not require that /sbin and /usr/sbin actually
|not be in their path.

OK. So if the majority of *your* users needs sbin paths and they don't want 
to (can't) add these paths in their personal config files, then you will 
not violate FHS if you put them in global configs. I don't see how this 
sitation with users can happen, but OK...

Still I don't see why you think this is a reason for such *bold* change in 
Debian. The present situation works for 99.9999% of users. The rest can 
do what you propose.

|By putting programs useful to non-administrators -- regardless of the intended
|use -- in /usr/sbin we are violating the FHS, and we are screwing our users.

Look, probably your users *need* this. Other systems don't need it 
probably. Imagine a university department working in biology or even 
physics. Who needs traceroute there? :) Nobody cares about the network. 
They want their job done and don't even know about traceroute,... The 
majority of the users in such places don't use more that 5-6 UNIX 
commands if they use it at all for something not related to e-mail.

If Debian puts sbin in global path, then there will be a lot of people, 
who will write "Let's take sbin out of global path"... for whatever reason. 

If you need sbin for *your* users, do it. Or even better put it in 
/etc/skel files for new user accounts. I would do this if I was on your 
place probably. And I would make a little web page explaining what changes 
users can make in their configs if they need them.

--JS


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