Bug 684216 – dev-lang/execline should install executables in /usr/bin not /bin

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Dmitry Bogatov 2019-04-24 02:17:29 UTC]

Hello.

Please consider moving binaries from dev-lang/execline (there are many
of them) out of /bin directory. Since they are not (normally) used during
first stage of boot, they belong to /usr/bin.

I would argue, that actually there is no need to install them into PATH
at all: they are hardly useful outside of execlineb scripts. I propose
to move all binaries except `execlineb' into /usr/libexec and to apply
patch to `execlineb` to automatically add location of auxliary scripts
into path. See https://bugs.debian.org/922642.

[Comment 1 Mira Ressel 2019-04-24 12:21:05 UTC]

The execline revdeps (s6, s6-rc, ...) assume that all execline tools are in the same directory; so the setup you're suggesting would be completely broken.

And I'm not willing to move execlineb from /bin to /usr/bin since its location has to be hardcoded in shebang lines and a move would thus break the systems of all users -- which is not something I'm going to do for purely aesthetic reasons.

I'm closing this bug for now; feel free to reopen it if you can present convincing /technical/ reasons which neccessitae a move.

[Comment 2 Mira Ressel 2019-04-24 12:29:02 UTC]

Oh, it looks like I've misread the code; in the default config, it's only assumed that all execline tools are in the PATH, so it may be possible to move the execline tools to /usr/bin while keeping execlineb in /bin.

This is still not something I'd do on a whim without good technical reasons, though. And if you want an aesthetic reason why the tools should be in /bin, consider that /bin is traditionally meant for all executables which are required to boot a system, and the execline tools clearly fall into this category on hosts which use s6-rc.