On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 07:22:26PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote: > Well, the FHS is contradicting itself here. On one hand, it says that > ifconfig is required to be in /sbin, on the other, according to this > paragraph, since a user could ocassionally wish to run ifconfig to list > the interfaces, it has to be in /bin. Someone should bring this up on > the FHS list. I agree with that much. > Blindly following a contradictory standard is only going to get us into > trouble later on. Blindly following your fiat declarations about traceroute are getting us into trouble now. > Just to rephrase my main reason for not moving traceroute, it's a tool that > is in the same category as ping/ifconfig/route, i.e., it's a network > diagnostic tool. On Linux, ping has traditionally been in /bin while the > other three have always lived in /sbin and /usr/sbin, respectively. You can have consistency or you can have tradition. You can't have both, so cut it out. Either move ping or move traceroute. Incidentally, if one wants to argue by analogy, traceroute is more similar to ping than it is to ifconfig or route, because both traceroute and ping actually send ICMP packets out over the interface, and neither ifconfig nor route do. Under such reasoning, traceroute uncontrovertibly belongs in bin, since the FHS explicitly says ping should go in bin. > Unless there is a very good reason (for the convenience of users who > should really be changing their PATH variable is not good enough IMHO), > we shouldn't move these things around as LOCAL scripts may depend on > them. LOCAL scripts should do things the right way. I.e., not depend on the exact installed pathname of a program that should be in the $PATH. (Yes, I think unprivileged scripts wanting to call traceroute should add /usr/sbin to their $PATH. The fact that they have to do this is evidence of the breakage you have caused, not a defense for leaving things as they are.) > Now if a later version of the FHS unequivocally stated that all these tools > should be in /bin or /usr/bin, and as a project we decide to do that, then > we can carry out such a change in a way not dissimilar to how things were > moved around when the FSSTND first came about. I see. So you'll stonewall on each and every command in sbin you maintain until the FHS explicitly decrees that they move to bin. This is unacceptable, and is why I argued elsewhere for a Debian policy that removes these decisions from discretion of the package maintainer; thanks to you, we've seen that package maintainers can't be trusted with this discretion. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | The noble soul has reverence for itself. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://www.debian.org/~branden/ |
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