A Proposed Change for Fedora 40: Unify /usr/bin With /usr/sbin

'This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux...' emphasizes its page on the Fedora project Wiki. 'As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.'

But Phoronix reports that 'One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations.'
The change proposal explains:

'The /usr/sbin directory becomes a symlink to bin, which means paths like /usr/bin/foo and /usr/sbin/foo point to the same place. /bin and /sbin are already symlinks to /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, so effectively /bin/foo and /sbin/foo also point to the same place. /usr/sbin will be removed from the default $PATH.'

Fedora years ago merged /bin and /usr/bin and as the last step they want to unify /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.

The change proposal argues that with this change, 'Fedora becomes more compatible with other distributions.'

- We have /sbin/ip while Debian has /bin/ip
- We have /bin/chmem and /bin/isosize, but Debian has /sbin/chmem and /sbin/isosize
- We also have /sbin/{addpart,delpart,lnstat,nstat,partx,ping,rdma,resizepart,ss,udevadm,update-alternatives}, while Debian has those in under /bin, etc.
- Fedora becomes more compatible with Arch, which did the merge a few years ago.

The proposal on the Fedora project Wiki offers this summary:
The split between /bin and /sbin is not useful, and also unused. The original split was to have 'important' binaries statically linked in /sbin which could then be used for emergency and rescue operations. Obviously, we don't do static linking anymore. Later, the split was repurposed to isolate 'important' binaries that would only be used by the administrator. While this seems attractive in theory, in practice it's very hard to categorize programs like this, and normal users routinely invoke programs from /sbin. Most programs that require root privileges for certain operations are also used when operating without privileges. And even when privileges are required, often those are acquired dynamically, e.g. using polkit. Since many years, the default $PATH set for users includes both directories. With the advent of systemd this has become more systematic: systemd sets $PATH with both directories for all users and services. So in general, all users and programs would find both sets of binaries...

Since generally all user sessions and services have both directories in $PATH, this split actually isn't used for anything. Its main effect is confusion when people need to use the absolute path and guess the directory wrong. Other distributions put some binaries in the other directory, so the absolute path is often not portable. Also, it is very easy for a user to end up with /sbin before /bin in $PATH, and for an administrator to end up with /bin before /sbin in $PATH, causing confusion. If this feature is dropped, the system became a little bit simpler, which is useful especially for new users, who are not aware of the history of the split.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.