[yocto] Adding 'sbin' to default path

[Ash Charles]

Hi Paul,

Thanks very much for the explanation!  I'm coming from an Ubuntu world
where it seems they didn't follow Debian's lead in this case ;-).

As this does seem to be distro-dependent, I'll maintain my patch as
being a reasonable workaround and now understand why meta uses
non-sbin path.

Cheers,
Ash

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 2:40 AM, Paul Eggleton
<paul.eggleton at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> Hi Ash,
>
> On Friday 30 January 2015 10:28:21 Ash Charles wrote:
>> Why does the PATH variable in the dot.bashrc shipped by the base-files
>> not include 'sbin' paths?  It seems like any interactive user should
>> be able to call e.g. 'ifconfig' informationally---they should, and
>> would still be, blocked from calling 'ifconfig eth0 up'
>>
>> After looking at the PATH for a generic user on my local Ubuntu
>> system, I just added a patch to my meta layer to add the following
>> line to the dot.bashrc:
>>
>> export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
>>
>> It seems to work well---users created with the extrauser class pull
>> this default from the skel.
>>
>> As this is security related though, I wanted to ask the question to
>> make sure I'm not doing something silly, dangerous or otherwise
>> idiotic.
>
> I think this is largely a distro decision - some distros include the sbin
> directories to PATH for all users (e.g. Fedora), others reserve that for root
> only (e.g. Debian) on the assumption that everything in /sbin and /usr/sbin is
> intended for administration rather than normal users. I guess we are just
> picking up the default from base-files which comes from Debian.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
>
> --
>
> Paul Eggleton
> Intel Open Source Technology Centre