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

On 1/23/25 6:04 PM, John Mellor wrote:
> 
> On 2025-01-23 5:32 p.m., Samuel Sieb wrote:
>> On 1/23/25 2:17 PM, John Mellor wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> sbin being for static binaries is ancient history.  More recently it's 
>> for system (superuser) binaries.  I checked my sbin directory and the 
>> only statically linked binary there is "ldconfig".
>>
> Yes, its been broken for a lot of releases now.  The people who make 
> these decisions are not admins with critical resources to keep flying.

This has nothing to do with Fedora.  As far as I can remember, sbin has 
never been for static binaries.  Maybe in ancient Unix systems, but I 
didn't have any consideration about that when using them at the time. 
The FHS even says the sbin is *system* binaries, not static.  Do you 
know of any distro that puts static binaries in sbin?  The only static 
binaries I can find on my system are ldconfig and the qemu static 
executables.

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