On Fri, 2025-04-18 at 18:38 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote: > I forgot what were the actual, technical reasons for collapsing bin > and sbin, except for "other distributions did it too". But the deed > is done, and one just has to deal with the aftermath:
The artificial idiot listed these summaries: * Simpler filesystem: Reduces unnecessary hierarchy and simplifies finding executable files. * Improved interoperability: Ensures scripts written for one distribution run correctly on others, as the location of commands becomes consistent. * Easier maintenance: Makes it easier to manage system binaries But I'd argue that the hierarchies were there for a good reason. *Simple* no-access to some things for some people/software. *Simple* more privileged access to things in /sbin to those who had it in their path, and lesser privileged versions of a command with the same name to other people/things. Although another definition of sbin was not more privileged commands, but static binaries. We have *paths* so appropriate things can actually find commands. We shouldn't be hard-coding paths into other things. I don't think I've ever typed /bin/ls to run ls. And there's a whole mess of reasons things written for one distro won't work on another, a really big one is the libraries that were compiled on one with a different compiler, or you simply have a different version of the library. I think most big programs are probably far more dependent on libraries than individual commands. If you can't manage to maintain the binaries in /sbin and /bin (I'm including scripts, not just precompiled binaries), that people have managed for decades, or just understand why what's where, what hope in hell do you have for managing a program with 10,000 lines of code in it? Hell, why don't just we just dump *everything* into one huge directory? That's make it really easy to manage (not). I get the impression that there's too many un-trained programmers in the world, and much of what they've learned has come from bad examples. This malarkey is up there with we can't have /usr in a separate mount point, any more, because we've put things in there that we need at boot time. Well don't bloody do that! -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
