Erik Auerswald wrote: ... >> Therefore I don't think it's a problem of the system, but >> more the behavior of coreutils tests to use administrative >> tools (those usually used by root and therefore in [/usr]/sbin). >> As a result, I think the test should either be run as root >> only (which is of course often not required) or care about >> having /usr/sbin and /sbin in the PATH when it's using such >> tools. > > I'd say that's reasonable. The FHS states that > > "Utilities used for system administration (and other root-only commands) > are stored in /sbin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/local/sbin." > (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#SBINSYSTEMBINARIES) > > Building software (e.g. coreutils) is not usually done with > an administrative account, thus PATH needs not contain the sbin > directories. If some test does require them, they should be added to > the PATH of that test. > > That said, probably some of the sbin programs should rather be in bin, > because they are of use for regular users as well.
The point is that the separation is not clear. Even /sbin programs like mkfs.* can be useful to non-root users. I use a few of those in parted tests. Also, ifconfig is useful to non-root users, yet resides in /sbin. Thus, by omitting /sbin and /usr/sbin, that version of sudo is causing trouble. Fedora made the same change to sudo, but ended up reverting it due to all of the trouble it caused.
