[812] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Agenda for 1/9
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Fields)
Thu Jan 9 15:28:00 1997
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 20:27:55 GMT
From: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
To: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
> I continue to think it is a serious mistake to assign deliberate intent
> to the whims that people implemented but never thought about and never
> intended to be fixtures of society or operating systems.
Fine, but this begs the question of whether the case we're talking
about is a whim or not. Do you know or are you also guessing?
It does seem clear to me though that someone has thought about this at
least a little bit. There are several symlinks in /usr/bin to
/usr/sbin in lieu of putting /usr/sbin into the user's path, for
example.
> And all the other binaries in there that people use.
Which would be what?
> Do you add those directories to your path?
Actually, no I don't. And I don't use anything in them but ping with
any regularity, which I have an alias for. But I don't consider
myself, or you, a good example of the main users we're targeting. We
have very different habits from those users and can easily customize
the software to do what we like.
> I do, and it certainly bothers me that I should have to.
Why this should bother you escapes me.
> The operating system ships with these programs, users should be able
> to use them with minimal inconvenience.
I don't find adding something to my path to be inconvenient.
> I would suggest that 95% of all of our users never use completion for
> the first word on the command line, only for filenames and such
> parameters.
An interesting suggestion.
And I would suggest that 99% of our users don't use anything in those
directories but ping.
I see this as pushing a change for 1% or less of the users, who
probably know how to edit their paths.
---
Another problem I've had in the past is programs which like to execute
subprograms using a search path. The more stuff you add into the search
path, the more room you have for name conflicts. I've seen this happen
even without those directories in the path. And this change doesn't
seem nearly important enough to me to even have to worry about that.
---
Who wants /sbin in the user's path why?
BTW, it's not even it root's path right now.
