Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:33:21 -0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> To: Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl> Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The strangeness called `sbin' Message-ID: <CAGE5yCqMcHwAhXKbyEH6vUR=N14tCjkgX=RMJTdq-po92GcOMQ@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20111110171605.GI2164@hoeg.nl> References: <20111110123919.GF2164@hoeg.nl> <CAGE5yCr3BzWzwOAqo7wifgUTRC%2BG=2o4bDmk9H-%2BCxr=zJqYmw@mail.gmail.com> <20111110171605.GI2164@hoeg.nl>
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On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Ed Schouten <ed@80386.nl> wrote: > Hi Peter, > > * Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>, 20111110 17:56: >> Of course, that pales in comparison to the impact of adding >> /usr/local/bin to the path, but it does show this does have potential >> user visibility. =A0And there's also the issue that most most users add >> every possible directory to their $PATH anyway. > > Exactly. Also, there are shells nowadays that cache all binaries in PATH > up front, such as zsh. When they start, they loop through all dirents in > all directories in $PATH and add it to a big cache. This entirely > defeats this purpose. I use tcsh and zsh, I'm aware of this cache. However, libc doesn't, so things like /bin/sh when running shell scripts do not. make(1) does not. People do still care about buildworld time. Simple things like changing gcc to static linking were a few percentage points of buildworld time, back in the day. Having /bin/sh as a static binary used to be 3%-5% of buildworld time, simply because fork/exec was faster as the copy-on-write burden was less. This stuff adds up. > I don't think that there are that many people who don't add /sbin and > /usr/sbin to $PATH nowadays. I have colleagues of mine who use Linux > systems that don't have this in their $PATH. When I ask them whether it > causes problems for them, they deny, but it turns out they simply put > `sudo' in front of it, to work around that, regardless of whether it was > needed. Having /sbin in $PATH where /sbin is a symlink to /bin would be worse than having no /sbin at all, from a perspective of rootvnode lock lifetime. If you can figure out how to get people to remove /sbin and /usr/sbin from their paths after the symlink changes then it becomes a moot point. But heck, I still have /usr/X11R6 in mine... :( --=20 Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 "If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell
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