Re: question about hardcoded binary paths (swapon / mkswap)

[Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 10:20:00AM +0200, Karel Zak wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 09:12:30PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > neither tool is set*id, 
> > and mkfs/fsck generally live in /sbin.  i guess if you're non-root and have 
> > /sbin/mkfs hardcoded in a script, then dropping FS_SEARCH_PATH might break 
> > existing code.
> 
> for systemd based distors the path should be also modified, we have
> all in /usr and /sbin and /bin are symlinks only.

(1) mkfs/fsck can be used on files that can be loopback mounted; I've 
used mkfs.*fs directly, but it may be desireable to support using 
mkfs -t as a user for creating filesystems on regular files.

(2) the /usr merge may be prevalent on RPM-based distros, but Debian does
not use it; I would assume that if they decided to support it, there would
be 2 releases before you could require it.
Additionally, the /sbin and /bin symlinks are there precisely because the
LSB requires certain commands to be in /bin and /sbin so that binaries
and scripts can rely on the paths. Ignoring this will cause needless
incompatability.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham