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

[William Hubbs]

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

>
> MJE
>