On 2025-11-24 Gilbert Detillieux wrote:
Keeping questions about the wisdom of merging /bin and /sbin aside for the moment*, this certainly doesn't sound like the smooth and easy Fedora upgrades you were bragging about just at the last meeting! 🤔😅
It's really no different than upgrading, say, Debian. You'll always find new bugs and package changes that affect you. The only difference is Fedora gives it to you in small chunks more frequently (every 6 months), whereas Debian you get years (and could then be dealing with many more problems all at once).
However, this is a legit bug in Fedora and it even had a bug entry that was marked solved. But it's not. In this instance Fedora dropped the ball -- the reason I wait a version back is so that this nonsense is fixed before I get around to it. And, to be fair, it seems to only hit people with "weird" setups with multiple arches -- not the average user.
Not apologizing for them, though! If they're going to commit to wacky "make work" schemes that solve nothing and have the potential to break things, then they should make sure they are rock solid. Call it a fail for the brand new Fedora leader.
- As someone who has to manage systems with lots of decidedly
non-privileged users, I'd actually advocate for moving MORE stuff into [/usr]/sbin, rather than combining them. But, trying to keep an open mind, I'm curious as to Fedora's rationale for this decision. And, is this a Fedora-only move for now, or are we likely to see this happen with other (particularly non-RHEL-based) distros?
You already know my stance. :-) It's just another Lennart-esque "out with the old" crap. However, I guess it was inevitable once they merged /bin and /usr/bin. However, /sbin does have a role in logically and semantically separating "root-only" stuff from "mere user" stuff. I used it heavily when writing my own /usr/local/sbin stuff to make it clear normal users weren't to concern themselves with this. Now the only hint will be 0700 root:root.
P.S. They merged sbin into bin in /usr/local too. And that failed too on my box, though it appears the scriptlet didn't even try? Maybe it's for new installs only.
As for "coming to a distro near you"? Just do a ll -d /bin /usr/bin ... is one a symlink? Ya, then there's your answer. Hopefully by the time it reaches the glacial distros they'll have fixed the migration scriptlet.