Bug#109182: Removing more historical cruft
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.5.6.0
Severity: wishlist
Some time ago (ok, a lot of time ago), lots of things were changed in the
filesystem (I can particulary recall the gradual phasing-out and elimination of
/usr/tmp and /var/adm). Now I think it's time to go on and move some more
things.
There are a number of binaries which should go into /bin instead of /sbin or
/usr/sbin -- the full argument is at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200106/msg00878.html
I have only one thing to add to that list: traceroute should be moved, _not_ to
/usr/bin as lots of people claim, but to /bin . It's as necessary and useful as
ping to diagnose networking trouble, and /usr might be mounted via NFS through
a gateway -- exactly what we want to diagnose. Same for the ipv6 versions of
ping and traceroute.
For a counter-argument, look at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/debian-devel-200106/msg00945.html
(which says only traceroute belongs to bin and not other tools like ifconfig).
To do it, the only needed things would be a small amount of relative symlinks.
After some releases (in Debian time, this means some years), most of the
symlinks would go away. Much like /usr/tmp and /var/adm.
If this is rejected, I still think that at least traceroute should be moved out
of /usr (whether it's /bin or /sbin doesn't matter much when the network is
down and /usr is NFS-mounted).
-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux flower 2.4.7 #1 Sat Jul 21 20:57:24 BRT 2001 i686
Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1
Versions of packages debian-policy depends on:
ii fileutils 4.1-2 GNU file management utilities.
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