>>>>> "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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