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

[Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2015 at 12:19:52PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On 02 Apr 2015 10:20, Karel Zak wrote:
> > If I good remember then the reason is that the helpers does not have
> > to be installed in standard PATH. Well, you're author of this thing
> > :-)
> 
> i wrote the code to make it a configure option, but the actual behavior predates 
> me.  i'm interested more in the behavior, not the exact configure option.

 So, the basis question is if we really need to support non-standard
 paths for the helpers. IMHO it's unnecessary legacy and I don't see a
 problem to drop this feature and require $PATH, and for critical
 things like fsck fallback to /sbin if $PATH is undefined.

 Comments?

> looks like mkfs added it during the 2.2->2.5 transition, but otherwise no 
> details in the bundled NEWS that i saw.  oh well.

 mkfs is deprecated, the right way is to call directly mkfs.<type>.

> mount makes sense as it's set*id and we can't trust users to not be evil :)

 It does not execute anything with root rights, but yes, hardcoded
 paths make sense there (just to avoid complexity and external
 dependencies on environment).

    Karel


-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak@redhat.com>
 http://karelzak.blogspot.com