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

On Thu, 2025-01-23 at 17:17 -0500, 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.

Fedora has never subscribed to this philosophy. Statically-linked
binaries are discouraged in the packaging guidelines, without any kind
of exception for this purpose:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/#_statically_linking_executables

none of our packages containing the tools you mentioned, or any others,
are statically linked. We're a Linux distribution, not Unix.

> 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.

The typical way to recover a Fedora system is with the recovery mode of
an installer image, or with a live image.
> 
> That thinking seems to have been lost in Fedora today, resulting in a 
> less recoverable platform.

It's not been "lost in Fedora today"; Fedora has never thought that
way.
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @[email protected]
https://www.happyassassin.net




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