Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: adding sbin directories to PATH for all users

[splite-gentoo@sigint.cs.purdue.edu]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 07:51:55PM +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, 25 Nov 2015, William Hubbs wrote:
>> From what I've read, the traditional difference between bin and sbin
>> was that sbin means static-bin and everything stored in there was to
>> be able to come up without libraries.
> 
> Source/reference for this?

Some of us are old enough to remember when it happened, sonny.  It was
Sun's idea.  Disks were expensive, so they wanted as much of the OS to be
mountable read-only via NFS as possible (remember diskless workstations?
no, you probably don't), so they moved /bin and /lib to /usr and replaced
them with symlinks.  /sbin was created to hold the necessary binaries
to get /usr mounted via NFS at boot.  They had to be statically-linked
because all the shared libraries were in /usr-- hence the "s" in "sbin".

If you really want a reference, here you go (page 7):

http://chiclassiccomp.org/docs/content/computing/Sun/800-1731-10_SunOS4.0ChangeNotes9May88.pdf

>> As mgorny was talking about earlier, a good chunk of what is in sbin
>> *can* be run by normal users.
> 
> Then it shouldn't be in sbin, in the first place. That's a separate
> discussion though.

Bollocks.  The whole "/sbin is for admins" meme is an after-the-fact
fabrication by those too young to remember the original purpose for it.
(Unfortunately, that included people at Sun.)

Now, get off my lawn.