There have been some discussions, starting at Fedora, about unifying
the bin and sbin directories:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin
Ha. 25 years later, they understand that the separation makes no sense,
and *just* when we were going to use that silly separation to work
around
an even sillier idiosyncrasy.
Talk about timing.
Also, even apart from unifying the directories, there are various
people who have expressed concern about having different programs with
the same name in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, thus making it something of
a potluck which one will be invoked depending on the user's search path.
I have to admit that I am kind of in agreement with that: different
binaries with the same name in directories that are both meant to be in
the search path seems... a bit fishy to me, and, yeah, with
the potential for problems if the directories are reordered
(I have seen arguments for both sides: "things in /sbin are more
important, so it should come before /bin; things in /bin are used
much more often, so it should come before /sbin").
I agree with all this. In principle, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin should not
be
distinct, for all these reasons.
The thing is, we're not in the realm of "good design", here. We're in
the
realm of "work around the braindeadness and use the cracks to uglyhack
something that works".
If rpm doesn't have an alternatives system to get the useless binaries
out
of the way, and if /usr/sbin is unusable, then there's nothing left but
"add another directory to the global PATH", which is super invasive.
--
Laurent
