Re: [gentoo-dev] newsitem: baselayout 2.5 changes

[M. J. Everitt]

On 08/02/18 22:33, William Hubbs wrote:
> All,
>
> here is a link to an old, but brief discussion about this.
>
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/2fc1f62c7cf225787fe52f4dace7368c
>
> I think we have talked about this several other times, but not done
> anything about it.
>
> On Thu, Feb 08, 2018 at 10:17:59PM +0000, M. J. Everitt wrote:
>>
>> On 08/02/18 22:13, William Hubbs wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 08, 2018 at 03:55:02PM -0500, Mike Gilbert wrote:
>>>> However, there are plenty of examples of commands that normal users
>>>> may run from sbin. Moving these commands often causes problems for
>>>> packages that either hard code absolute paths, or detect paths at
>>>> build time. I think it would be less disruptive to add sbin to PATH
>>>> than it would be to try and "fix" all the packages that install
>>>> commands in the wrong place.
>>> There are no reasons to remove the *sbin directories from PATH; I know
>>> of no other distros that do this.
>>>
>>> William
>>>
>> Pardon my ignorance, but does that mean you are essentially relying on
>> file system features/permissions and security settings to enforce
>> correct use of system tools?! Or is this just to make sudo/etc commands
>> 'more convenient' ?!
> The basic problem is that what goes in *bin vs *sbin is quite arbitrary
> and the best way to fix it is to make all of the *bin and *sbin
> directories accessible to all users.
>
> You can't rely on a path to separate system-only programs from
> programs that users might want to run, and some programs can be run by
> users to look around but not change things.
>
> Here is one non-gentoo source discussing this.
>
> http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html
>
> Even if we don't adopt the usr merge in Gentoo Linux as default, removing *sbin
> from the path doesn't make sense.
>
> William
>
Thank you William, and also rich for your explanations! I do see where
you're coming from now.

Michael.