>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
Russ> with a narrower issue). Several other people were, I think,
Russ> arguing for (a), but I'm not sure if they would continue to do
Russ> so when it's put in these terms.
It's hard for me to express what I was advocating for in the terms you
have adopted.
I think you've advanced the discussion significantly by making it clear
where the difficulty is, which will help me focus my argument.
Russ> If someone wants to argue for (a) or (c), I think the biggest
Russ> problem with either of them is an enforcement mechanism.
My problem with (b) is that I value interfaces and that especially for
/bin/sh I do think that /bin/sh is more portable as an interface path
than /usr/bin/sh.
I care a lot that we use /bin/sh in our documentation and examples
(especially in policy).
I care a lot that we point out that the reality of the situation is
people will see other paths.
At least for things traditionally in /bin I do not want to encourage
those other paths, but I also don't think it is often a good use of
project resources to "fix" those other paths.
In some cases (for example what version of a path autoconf detects), I
think that patching individual packages to detect a particular path
would be net harmful.
So I want to argue for (a) with no enforcement mechanism in packages.
1) Policy should encourage /bin paths for binaries traditionally in
/bin. (At a minimum I'd like to see this for /bin/sh and /bin/bash).
That at most makes it a minor bug if you don't follow that
encouragement.
2) The examples in policy should use the standard interface paths.
(This is the thing I care most about).
3) I'd like to see policy point out that /usr/bin paths will end up
being used, and packages SHOULD work regardless of which path is used.
I think there are some complexities here. Imagine someone writes a tool
to determine if something is a shell script. If it's security
sensitive, I think it is important that it work both for /bin/sh and
/usr/bin/sh.
If it's a syntax highlighting program and it only detects
/bin/sh as a valid shell script, I'd be okay if the maintainer didn't
want to fix it but instead said "fix your shell scripts if they say
/usr/bin/sh." (I think the maintainer would be doing a better job if
they supported both). But I would not be comfortable with a syntax
highlighting tool pushing people toward /usr/bin/sh.
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