Re: Intent To Split: netbase
On Tue, 15 Aug 2000 21:43:31 Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> The question that seems to want to be raised is whether this
> is true? Are people really confused more by having extra commands
> available, or are they confused by _not_ havingcertain commands
> present?
I was confused by not having ifconfig in my user path. On this machine,
there's only a dial-up net connection, and it has some small connectivity
problems. I need to check whether the line's really up. I found
myself going super-user to issue the command rather than running /sbin/ifconfig.
Which is in my opinion a stupid thing to do :), but of course it felt convenient
to run sudo ifconfig, and then hmmm let's see... we must come to the conclusion
that there are thousands of programs with non-sense names anyway, so it would
be beneficial for the user to have anything that he can run on his path.
If you want people to be able to navigate in the list of available executables
in a meaningful way, please author a program that does it. Bash's command
completion just doesn't scale. Menu system is a good start, but not the ultimate
way to find out about which programs you may run.
I'd recently written in another mail to this list:
-------------------
Although ifconfig resides in /sbin, /sbin is not in the standard user path.
However, many users need to run ifconfig, such as checking the IP address,
or whether a dial-up link has really come up.
I think it would be beneficial to supply a symbolic link to /usr/bin for this
purpose. It seems that some other programs might require similar arrangements.
Rationale for this proposal: Users do not need to know the location of
programs that they can run, they must be able to run all the "user" programs
that they can. A "user" program in this context refers to programs which
are intended to be run by people, In this sense, ifconfig seems to be a "user"
program as well as a program that can be run automatically.
------------------
Yes, and I got a wise reply claimining that "ifconfig" is a system program,
and a user should manually augment his path if he wishes to run it.
I request you to re-consider the proposal. Supplying a symbolic link would
be better than putting the /sbin in user's path, because we may then decide
which programs in /sbin are needed by normal users.
Thanks,
__
Eray Ozkural
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