Hi,
If all we are interested in hacving a miny contentous debate,
please skip this message, because this pre-supposes a desire to
actually compromise and come to a rough consensus. Unfortunately,
common sense and a desire to actually co-operate seem to have been
sorely lacking of late.
>>"Joey" == Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Joey> Branden Robinson wrote:
>> On the other hand, fsck seems to be a good example of a program that can't
>> do much for the unprivileged user.
>> advocate type="devil's">
Joey> Anyone can own a block device.
>> /advocate>
Hmm. Lets step back here, and take a deep breath. What we need
to consider is whether the underlying principle is desirable -- does
it make sense to have two separate path components? The rationale was
that for the common user, there are programs that are not used very
often, and may not even work when invoked, and thus tend to only
confuse the uninitiated, and annoy enerally by messing up command
comletion.
The question that seems to want to be raised is whether this
is true? Are people really confused more by having extra commands
available, or are they confused by _not_ havingcertain commands
present?
The irony is, of course, that the people generally making such
decisions (like this forum) are rarely a decent sampling of the user
base, or the hypothetical Joe user.
If the answer is yes, there is still merit in the idea of
separate path components, one needs to find a way to draw the line on
where the utility lies. And we need to determine the utility for the
common case -- since this is merrely a default, individual users can
add to path components, create symlinks in ~/bin. or whatever, to get
around the differences.
I am sure that the imaginative people on this forum can come
up with obscure cases where a cmmon user can generally use _any_
program out there, espescially with a judicious choice of
permissions. Unless one draws the line somewhere, we shall be left
with no choices for the sbin path component whatsoever. I am not so
sure that is useful.
To answer Joey's comment: Any one who owns a block device is
probably competent enough to change their own path, and this case is
definitely not enough to move fsck out of sbin.
As to mount telling us what is mounted, so does df, and cat
/etc/mtab. again, not enough to move mount; unless one is being
contrary.
manoj
who'l probably just get flamed by Overfiend now
--
Every Horse has an Infinite Number of Legs (proof by intimidation):
Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs, and
in front they have fore-legs. This makes six legs, which is
certainly an odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number
that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, horses have an
infinite number of legs. Now to show this for the general case,
suppose that somewhere, there is a horse that has a finite number of
legs. But that is a horse of another color, and by the lemma ["All
horses are the same color"], that does not exist.
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
