On 11/16/18 4:42 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):
>
>> What *I'm* talking about is I want to continue having /sbin separate
>> from /bin and /usr/bin, because the /sbin varieties holds statically
>> compiled programs guaranteed to work at the earliest of boots, and in
>> the case of /sbin, guaranteed to be available as soon as / is mounted.
> Steve, I'm not sure where you arrived at the notion that binaries in
> /sbin should be expected to be, or necessarily ought to be, static
> binaries. I'm not aware of any such norm. (Compiling static is a crude
> but certainly effective way to end some dependency issues, but not
> necessarily desirable.)
>
> In case you were not aware (and absolutely no condescension intended if
> you were already well aware of this), the 's' in 'sbin' signifies
> 'normally needed only by the superuser'. It doesn't signify static.
>
I thought it was "system", but I don't even know who originated the
separation. It certainly precedes Linux.

As for the "statically linked binaries in /sbin", that may come from the
(formerly?) common practice of having all the binaries needed for system
startup statically linked in case something happened to /lib.

It's scary how unreliable our systems used to be compared to now.

--

Daniel Taylor