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

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

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On 02 Apr 2015 21:15, Karel Zak wrote:
> 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.

the reason for adding that configure option was to support packages that install 
both into /bin and /usr/bin.  i understand some distros will override those 
settings of upstream packages, but Gentoo has opted not to since there's no 
reason at all to force them all into /sbin (and even existing tools in /sbin are 
pretty pointless).  although it mattered more when the code was only searching 
that list and not $PATH at all.

my preference would be just to do execvp() and be done so we can stop these 
distro bikesheddings (/bin & /usr-merge and such).
-mike

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