[Redirecting back to Dng. Hope you don't mind.]

Quoting Tom H (tomh0665@???):

> I've just read your post about /sbin
>
> https://www.mail-archive.com/dng@lists.dyne.org/msg23646.html
>
> gdisk: It's become unnecessary as long as fdisk is installed because
> the latter has been able to handle gpt disks for at least 5 years.
>
> efibootmgr: It's definitely essential if you're running from efi firmware.

Thanks for taking the trouble to tell me that, Tom! I've not needed to
get into the details of these things, so there are certainly areas
I'm not familiar with.

Also, even though I hold a traditionalist view that a system should
include usable executables in /sbin and /bin able to boot, restore,
recover, and/or repair the system in a 'maintenance' situation where
/usr might not be available (and in general 'single-user mode'
operations where only the root FS is mounted), I try not to be
doctrinaire about these things. Specifically, I can easily imagine
situations where I might _prefer_ to PXEboot (or boot from flash drive)
a maintenance distro ISO to do repair, recovery, etc. Because there are
some really nice maintenance distros, and sometimes specialisation wins.

Which is to say it's not a huge tragedy if some of the root FS utilities
don't work without /usr, if only because I might prefer to boot to a
different image for those functions anyway.