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Re: FTBFS when /bin is before /usr/bin in PATH?



Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> writes:

> El 7/5/25 a las 10:39, Matthias Urlichs escribió:
>> On 06.05.25 13:31, Ahmad Khalifa wrote:
>>> Fedora doesn't set /bin anymore in the $PATH
>> IMHO we should follow that practice, post-Trixie.
>
> I disagree that we should do that.
>
> AFAIK, the usr-merge was not about moving everything to usr/bin (that's an
> implementation detail) but about making /bin and /usr/bin equivalent.
>
> So, while we could in theory drop /bin, doing so might involve undesired
> side effects.

I think we need to separate:

1) Removing /bin from the default PATH environment variable.

2) Removing the /bin symlink.

To clarify, are you against both or just one of these?

I hadn't thought about 2) but what you write sounds more like you are
thinking of 2) than 1) which was where the discussion started.

> For example, some configure script might look in the PATH and decide
> that sh is in /usr/bin and ship shell scripts as #!/usr/bin/sh.

Right.  I'm not sure solving that problem by adding /bin to PATH before
/usr/bin is the best long-term solution, though.  Guix has shown that
the only hard-coded path that is required is /bin/sh and I think that is
a good model and that all upstream projects should work in that model by
default.  So I'd prefer if such problems were fixed upstream, rather
then Debian adopting workarounds.

I don't care strongly about the solution here, I just find that the
'gradle' behaviour buggy and the 'setpriv --reset-env' default PATH
value surprising.  Both of these issues can be resolved without doing
anything about /etc/login.defs PATH, but it seems we may also think
about /etc/login.defs changes too, because the gradle/setpriv problems
wouldn't have happened if 1) and/or 2) above was implemented.

/Simon

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