Re: Will bin-sbin-merge migrate existing systems?

On 2025-01-23 2:51 p.m., Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2025-01-23 at 06:00 +0000, George R Goffe via test wrote:
>> . . .
>>
>> 2) Are we forgetting why we have the concept of statically linked binaries?
> What does that have to do with where they are?

If I may offer some insight:

In the Unix philosophy, everything in /sbin is statically linked.  
Things in /bin may be statically linked, but more normally are dynamic.  
The root user PATH normally has /sbin and /usr/sbin before the others, 
while normal users have that reversed or even leave /sbin and /usr/sbin 
out altogether.  This makes a difference when you are trying to recover 
a system in the middle of the night. With tools like vi, sed, grep, 
mount etc. being statically linked, there are less dependencies required 
to get basic recovery tools working, increasing the likelihood that you 
can get the system at least partially back up without having to 
reinstall and lose mission-critical data.

At least twice (once on Solaris and once on VMware), I've had to recover 
a system with damaged filesystems spread across hundreds of drives and 
still meet a 5-nines uptime guarantee. Reinstall is not an option in 
these circumstances ever.  If you work out the numbers, I think that you 
will agree that having standalone tool binaries is far more important 
than saving a bit of disk on anything larger than a single-drive desktop.

That thinking seems to have been lost in Fedora today, resulting in a 
less recoverable platform.

> . . .
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