On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 12:14:55AM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote: > On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 12:05:02AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 11:35:36PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote: > > > I think the whole /sbin directory is old unix-craft like /usr. > > > > We will not link /sbin to /bin. > > It's nice that you give a good argumentation. I'm really convinced.
The paradigm to apply here is not: "We merge directories whenever we think the distinction is too small to be worth the separation it creates.", but the paradigm is "We merge directories whenever the separation is artificial or based on obsolete technical, rather than semantic reasons." The distinction between /bin and /usr/bin is based on obsolete technical reasons, and there is no semantical difference between the two that matters to the user. The distinction between /bin and /sbin is supported by some real semantic difference between the two. You can argue that the difference is small. You can argue that the number of binaries that end up in /sbin are small. Both argumentes are correct, but they are not sufficient to support changing that right now. At some time we might make more changes than just the current ones. But our plate is pretty full with things we need to get designed, implented and explained to the world that really are supported by strong paradigms, that we don't want to load ourselve with weaker, less clear cut things that might or might not be worth to be cleaned up at some time. The /sbin and /bin argument has come up in the past, on this list or bug-hurd or debian-hurd, or probably at all of these places, and the reason to reject it have always been the same. For some people, we might not be radical enough. For many other people we have already jumped over the edge. I think we have so far always found a good rationale to go as far as we do, but not further. That we have /X11R6 at all is really only because Debian is not yet ready for it (but I hope it will be), this is more important to get rid off than sbin (because there is a real technical defect as a consequence). Also moving some stuff from sbin to bin would be very beneficial (like mke2fs and e2fsck, I am always annoyed if I don't have it in my path, although I frequently create and corrupt file system images in files as a user). As long as there are programs that can only be sensefully run by the sysadmin, there will be /sbin. So let's fix it so everybody can run those programs sensefully, then we can get rid off /sbin as a side effect ;) Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de _______________________________________________ Help-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd