Subject: Re: Bug#3100:

From: Bdale Garbee <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 08:41:37 -0600

In article <[email-masked]> you wrote:
: Bdale Garbee:
: > I believe strongly that rmt belongs in /usr/sbin, with the symlink
: > /etc/rmt -> /usr/sbin/rmt.
: 
: Do we really need to the symlink?

Yes.  Let me explain this, again.

The planet is full of non-Debian, non-Linux machines with rmt in /etc/rmt
since that's where BSD put it long ago.

As a result, applications that want to use rmt have traditionally been 
compiled to know that they should look for rmt on the remote system in 
/etc/rmt, and use rsh as the transport to get there.  In most cases, the 
clients don't allow you to change any of this without recompiling.  
Therefore, if you want to ship clients for things like dump, tar, cpio 
that can use tape drives on existing machines, they need to look for rmt 
in /etc/rmt.  

The bottom line is that if you want to be interoperable with the rest of 
the world, you need to support the existence of rmt in /etc/rmt.  However, 
the FSSTND frowns on this, so having the binary actually be installed in 
/usr/sbin/rmt with the link for compatibility seems like the best option...
leaving users to figure this out on their own is a very bad idea.

This is a case where there is a defacto standard that is "broader" than what
is controlled by the Linux community through mechanisms like the FSSTND.  We
could choose to deviate, but I believe it would just make this ugly situation
even worse...

Bdale