[Yum] yum location

[Robert G. Brown]

On 26 Aug 2002, seth vidal wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-08-26 at 21:38, Konstantin Riabitsev wrote:
> > On Mon, 2002-08-26 at 21:14, seth vidal wrote:
> > > Hey,
> > >  now that yum is reasonably useful for non-root users (yum info, yum
> > > list, yum provides) should I make a symlink or something into /usr/bin?
> > > 
> > > that way its in the user's default path.
> > > 
> > > I figured I'd let it be a symlink for now, then for > 1.0 it would be
> > > the default.
> > > 
> > > but I didn't want to break anyone's scripts who are using /usr/sbin.
> > 
> > How about the other way around, then -- put it in /usr/bin/yum, but
> > symlink it from /usr/sbin. This is less crufty. :)
> > 
> 
> yah - that sounds like a good idea.
> 
> and frankly yum-arch has no reason to be in /usr/sbin at all.

What?  And break a long tradition of not providing user access to useful
tools with an informational or operational component (like
/sbin/chkconfig, /sbin/ifconfig, /sbin/halt, /sbin/reboot,
/usr/sbin/nfsstat, /usr/sbin/traceroute and more) in linux?  I'm
surprised at you...

ORIGINALLY AND TECHNICALLY, of course, the "s" used to stand for
"static", and the things in /sbin and /usr/sbin were supposed to be
static linked so that they would run without shared library support on a
crippled or still-booting system.  Not that that has been strictly true
for a long time, but most of what is in /sbin, at least, does only
depend on libc and ld-linux, and /usr/sbin has long been the home of
daemons, even though they generally require lots more libraries.

Even today, a primary reasoning that should be examined for any given
potential location would be the issue of what is available at any given
point in an install and what might need to be mounted static or could be
mounted read only.  Once upon a time in Unix, /usr might not have been
mounted at all early in an install, for example, which of course would
complicate mightily any python-based install.  Nowadays I don't think
this much matters, as the base package already installs (I'm sure)
/usr/bin and all sorts of things that live therein and a
yum-bootstrapped install would of course have to install /usr/bin/python
in any event in order to proceed.

Given that yum is is a userspace (essentially unprivileged) script with
no associated daemons, and that python is in /usr/bin, I'd just make all
of it live in /usr/bin, which is on root's path, and not bother with
symlinks or *sbin at all.  There are plenty of mostly-root-used tools
(e.g. /usr/bin/ldd) that live in /usr/bin, so yum won't be lonely there.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu