sbin and PATH

[Matt Zimmerman]

One of the things that bothers me when settling into a new system, often the
first thing which triggers me to pull in my customized shell configuration,
is the absence of the sbin directories in my PATH.

Yes, I know the distinction between bin and sbin, and in a vague sort of way
it has the potential to be useful.  However, I have never seen a Linux
distribution, Debian included, which actually implements this distinction
correctly.  Honestly.

/sbin and /usr/sbin are full of programs which are useful to normal users,
and which I expect to be able to use.  tracepath/traceroute, modinfo/lsmod,
arp, sysctl, and ifconfig are some of the most common offenders, though I've
finally retrained myself to use ip(8) in place of ifconfig(8).  I also
happen to use lots of filesystem-related tools as non-root users, because I
use UML.  I commonly use all of mkfs.*, fsck.*, tune2fs, etc.

The primary options, as I see them, are:

1. Add {,/usr{,/local}}/sbin to the default PATH and be done with it

2. Move the misplaced binaries into their proper places

3. Get rid of */sbin entirely, symlink it and ignore the distinction

4. Let the suffering continue

#3 is not very appealing, considering the FHS blessing of sbin.  #2 involves
a lot of intrusive divergence in packaging, and probably some arguments as
well.  #4 makes me crazy.

Guess which option I prefer.

Opinions?

-- 
 - mdz