Developments
In this section the people, personalities and debates on the @fedora-devel mailing list are summarized.
Contributing Writer: Oisin Feeley
PATH:/sbin Tab Confusion
Some time ago (2008-04-23) it was proposed[1] by Tom Callaway to append /sbin\ and /usr/sbin to the path of non-root users. The rationale was to make it easier for non-root users to use tools which are traditionally perceived as "administration" tools, for example ifconfig, parted and fdisk. A good overview of the problem was posted[2] by Behdad Esfahbod . An excellent compendium of objections to the proposal posted[3] by Enrico Scholz encapsulates most of the problems perceived at the time. Several prolonged discussions on the topic mostly centered[4] around alternate strategies which included moving binaries from /sbin to /bin, symlinking from one to the other directory, or setting up[5] sudo by default.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01625.html
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01661.html
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01649.html
[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01727.html
[5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01629.html
The case for moving many of the binaries was made[6] strongly by David Cantrell and arch-skeptic Ralf Corsepius voiced[7] a general objection that "[...] this discussion is as old as */sbin exists [... and I] consider both proposals to be populist propaganda." After much thrashing out of the issue the proposal was coalesced[8] in the Feature named "/sbin Sanity" and /usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin were appended to the PATH of normal users of Fedora 10. A related change suggested was to allow firstboot to configure sudo to grant the first created user all privileges but this feature is not present in Fedora 10 Beta.
With the release of Fedora 10 Beta some of the predicted daily inconveniences of the change have been realized[9]. Matt Miller (who had been consistently opposed to the change) reported that command-line completion was cluttered with multiple unwanted choices: "We've just made the command line a lot less user friendly for common use in exchange for an ugly fix to a small inconvenience." In a wryly humorous post he noted that due to wanting /etc/profile.d to continue working he could not simply set a static path. Stephen Smoogen joked[10] that Matt was the "[...] first systems administrator I have met in several years who hasn't had /usr/sbin:/sbin in their default path. You sure they didn't make you a manager and didn't tell you?" and added that "I think the chance for putting it back is still there.. if someone is willing to do the work on the hard but correct way? I think it was crickets the last couple of times when volunteers were asked for that." Nigel Jones was among several who asserted[11] that typing the full paths was what they preferred and Stephen admitted[12] that he had received some offlist ribbing and promised to mend his ways: "I am removing /sbin:/usr/sbin from my path and learning to type /usr/sbin for the commands I have 'shortcutted' over the years. Next I will be removing the bad habit of '/sbin/sudo bash' :)"
[6] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01732.html
[7] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-April/msg01761.html
[8] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SbinSanity
[9] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00001.html
[10] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00003.html
[11] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00004.html
[12] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00181.html
Ville Skyttä and Matt Miller volunteered[13] to take up the burden of moving appropriate binaries out of /sbin and into /bin in order to help revert the change.
[13] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00003.html
Over on @fedora-desktop Rahul Sundaram suggested a kickstart snippet which would add the first user to the wheel group and add blanket permissions to the wheel group in /etc/sudoers . Colin Walters agreed[14] with the concept but wondered "[a]re we too far into the F10 process for this?"
[14] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-October/msg00006.html
Speeding-up Modprobe and MAKEDEV
Inspired by Arjan van de Ven's five-second Asus EeePC boot and Mandriva's work on similar topics Jakub Jelinek posted[1] his patches to improve the speed of modprobe and MAKEDEV. He hoped that this sharing would result in more community experimentation. The first patch enables depmod -a to produce compact binary files which can be searched for aliases and dependencies more quickly than the standard text files, which are still also produced. The patch to MAKEDEV similarly reduces the size of the searched files, in this case config files, and improves the efficiency of an inner loop. The times appeared to be decreased by several orders of magnitude according to the sample figures posted by Jakub.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00043.html
Kyle McMartin was excited[2] and suggested that "[t]he biggest win by far for MAKEDEV is profiling the often hit devices, and prioritizing things. Dave Airlie moved a bunch of the cciss and other almost never-seen devices to be sourced last and ended up with a huge win." Bill Nottingham responded[3] that MAKEDEV ought not to be run at boot at all. Jakub Jelinek was not optimistic that the MAKEDEV patch would be applied upstream as he noted[4] that he had sent it upstream over ten months ago.
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00046.html
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00047.html
[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00054.html
Uniform Proxy Settings
The issue of constructing a uniform method of enforcing proxy settings for applications was raised[1] by Kulbir Saini. He complained "[w]henever I try a new version of Fedora, the first problem I face is setting the proxy. It seems for almost every application, I have to specify proxy at a different place."
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00097.html
A reply by Simon Andrews recapped[2] previous debates on the topic by pointing out the twin problems of a lack of a common setting and the inability of many applications to update their proxy settings on the fly. Simon suggested that a localhost proxy could be forced on all applications if NetworkManager were to contain hooks to re-route local proxy requests either directly to the internet or via a secondary proxy. He admitted "this all feels a bit icky to me - but I can't think of a nicer way of doing this which doesn't require the cooperation of the authors of every proxy-aware application."
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00159.html
Nicolas 'kwizart' Chauvet had also thought about the problem and made[3] some changes to libproxy which he hoped would solve the problem. Dan Winship wrote[4] a great post explaining that libproxy could adaptively use whichever backend was appropriate for the environment in which it was used and although it was not widely used by applications it looked set to become an integral part of GNOME.
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00098.html
[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00185.html
After Colin Walters commented[5] that he would like to "[...] see the desktop standardize around libsoup[6] , for two primary reasons: 1) Mainloop integration 2) Hopefully forthcoming support for reading Firefox cookies [...]" a minor flamewar erupted when James Antill wondered "Why do "desktop people" keep proposing things that are _only_ acceptable in a monolithic desktop application?" with reference to the mainloop integration. This developed into a comparison[7] between future scenarios in which PackageKit overrode yum downloads in a desktop scenario versus the simplicity of using yum on the command line. James was scathing on the subject of ignoring actual users (whom he asserted prefer gnome-terminal) to "[...] 60+ year olds who don't, and are about to be a majority of our users RSN."
[5] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00188.html
[6] libsoup is a GNOME client/server library for HTTP used in evolution, seahorse and rhythmbox among others and is integral to the OnlineDesktop.
[7] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00201.html
Fedora 10 Early Branch Now Available
Jesse Keating announced[1] on 2008-10-01 that it was now possible for developers wishing to concentrate on stabilization to branch their packages. A link to request a branch was provided. In response to Jeroen van Meuewen it was explained[2] that this was not mass-early-branching but was an attempt to satisfy two classes of maintainers: those that needed to continue future development and those that used the entire development cycle for the current release.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00083.html
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00126.html
MichaelSchwendt rejected[3] the idea as "[u]nconvincing and not helpful", citing increased bureaucracy as the main negative outcome and suggesting that a potential cascade of maintainers scrambling to branch and rebuild in response to early branches of dependencies would result.
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00202.html
SELinux - Copying ISO Files
A paraliptic swipe at SELinux by Jon Masters asked[1] "[...] how is the *average* user supposed to [...] copy the content of /mnt over to e.g. /somewhere/fedora/9/i386 for NFS installs [?]" Dan Walsh was surprised[2] and responded "Why would the copy fail? cp should just work and set the files to the context of the destination directory. If this fails it is a bug." Jon conceded[3] that there was a bug and segued into a mini-rant on SELinux.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00140.html
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00154.html
[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00203.html
Jesse Keating offered[4]: "The average user double clicks on the iso in Nautilus, which mounts it for them. Then they click/drag the fileset to where they want it and Nautilus copies it for them."
[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-October/msg00174.html