Re: RFD: Essential packages, /, and /usr

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 16-Jun-02, 22:04 (CDT), Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote: 
> 	Having an explicit, separate documentation of technical things
>  that has to be maintained, or else it slips out of synchronization
>  with reality, is certainly not to be preferred to haveing a
>  deterministic way of inferring such information.

But it's not a reliable prediction. It's simply a repoort on the present
situation. There's nothing to prevent things from being moved out of
/bin (except those subject to the FHS). Additionally, a list of "these
tools are guaranteed to be available before /usr is mounted" is not the
same as a list of "these are the tools from Essential packages that are
in /bin:/sbin", and need not be particularly fluid.

>  In other words, Branden's simple shell snippet is the documented
>  list. I seem to be missing the reason why that is not good enough.

Because it's not reliable. At least some portion of it is subject to the
random whims of the package maintainers (or, far more likely, the random
whims of bug reporters and a package maintainer who is (understandably)
unaware that a few of Debian's umpteen thousand packages rely on that
particular binary being in /bin).

Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland

    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net


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