Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 11:56:06AM -0800, William Park wrote:
> I think we're speaking past each other.  Historical convention has
> accumulated a lot of baggage.  What you're typing only makes sense
> in the ecosystem it's intended to be used.  If you're supposed to
> care which library you're supposed to link with, then what you typed
> is inadequate and vague.

But you are not supposed to care.  If you start splitting things into
seperate directories, suddenly you do have to care.

Seperate directories try to solve the problem of how to keep track of
a package to make removal or upgrades simpler.  Well that's already
solved just fine with a decent package manager.  Getting all commands
into a path that you can actually find things to run them, and getting
libraries into a searchable list for the linker/compiler/runtime to
find things is an issue that isn't trivial to solve if you split things
all over.  Hence the current system nicely deals with the real issues,
while package managers nicely deal with the simple issue (the one /opt,
and c:\program files try to solve stupidly, by instead making you have
to solve the much messier and harder problem).

> Also, you're making selective argument.  For example, 'named' is
> DNS server, and 'bind' is its package name.  Another, 'httpd' is
> web server, and 'apache' is the package name.  In these and other
> cases, you have to know their names and where they are coming from.
> I'm merely saying that, if we had to care from the beginning, then
> a lot of headache could be avoided.

Fortunately the init scripts to handle them match the name of the package.

And in the case of debian at least, the apache process is
/usr/sbin/apache2, not httpd.  bind is still named named (Hmm, that
looks confusing, but correct).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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