Hello, Anyone not interested in ancient history can skip this mail.
On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 11:20:47PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > On 2024-07-14 (five days before the iproute2 change was made), there was > this conversation on #debian-devel: > > 19:14 <petn-randall> Is there a reason why iproute2 ships a symlink > from /sbin/ip to /bin/ip? I've looked into the packaging repo and it > seems to predate the git log. I was involved with iproute2 during the era when some sbin->bin shuffling happened, but apparently `ip` moving happened long before and only other tools followed later on. >From debian/changelog: iproute (20010824-7) unstable; urgency=medium * Move `ip' binary to /bin to fix FHS violation (closes: Bug#134812) -- Juan Cespedes <cespedes at debian.org> Mon, 4 Mar 2002 00:20:30 +0100 (My recollection was that formorer moved ip, but apparently not. Calling it a FHS violation is IMHO a very strong claim.) Also relevant: iproute (20051007-4) unstable; urgency=low * Moved *stat binaries to /usr/bin/ (Closes: #350703) [...] -- Alexander Wirt <formorer at debian.org> Sun, 5 Feb 2006 09:47:36 +0100 ... and ... iproute (20110629-1) unstable; urgency=low [ Alexander Wirt ] * Install ss to /bin instead of /sbin. [...] -- Andreas Henriksson <andreas at fatal.se> Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:29:04 +0200 FWIW I've personally supported sbin and bin merging at some point, just for the simple reason that I'll never get back all the time wasted on arguing with people who want things moved around (but refuse to take it up with upstream). Apparently this is something which is still taking up time and even causing new bugs. > ... > 19:52 <cjwatson> petn-randall: > https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%2Fsbin%2Fip%5Cb&literal=0 has > a pretty non-trivial list of things that would need fixed before > removing that (and of course some false positives) While I generally don't support hard-coding paths, not having the sbin symlinks means we have nothing in the location where upstream install these tools, which I also think is a bad idea. (I'm not sure if other distros follows upstreams location, but I'm still willing to call having the tools in bin a Debian-ism.) For a current list of tools where we override the upstream install path, see debian/iproute2.install in the source package or at: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/iproute2/-/blob/debian/sid/debian/iproute2.install > > I realize it wasn't petn-randall who made this change, but it seems a > big coincidence that the symlink was dropped a few days after this IRC > conversation; and yet it seems nobody bothered to do the most basic due > diligence that I pointed out here, which is kind of sad. (I fixed > wireless-tools after this change caused an RC bug there.) > > -- > Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org] > Regards, Andreas Henriksson
