During a lazy Sunday afternoon I noticed that the mixertui binary provided by audio/mixertui gets installed in $LOCALBASE/sbin rather than $LOCALBASE/bin. As I understand, /sbin is mainly "reserved" for system administration utilities which are of little use to a non-root user. However, at least to me personally, it seems that something like audio/mixertool is very useful to a non-root. Is /sbin as the destination for audio/mixertui within the philosophy of FreeBSD?
Maintainer informed via mail
(In reply to Joel Bodenmann from comment #0) Thank you for the report. I have not received this email, probably I need to update some option in bugzilla. Rationale for mixertui in /usr/sbin. The decision/problem arose when I chose the section for the mixertui manual. The manual for intro(8) and the other manuals in the section 8 declare: "FreeBSD System Manager's Manual". So I chose the section 8, "mixertui.8". Indeed mixertui can get and set the state of Sound Subsystem, that is a component of the system/kernel, furthermore it can change the state of the underlying hardware. (Instead the section 1 of the manual seems adapt for awk, grep, sed, and so on.) Then I read the hier(7) manual, it does not mention the directory for executables with root permissions. Then, I chose /usr/local/sbin because: 1) from hier(7): /sbin/ system programs and administration utilities... 2) at the time I was using prometheus_sysctl_exporter(8), it does not require root permissions. However, from its manual: "print kernel state as Prometheus metrics", so it is in /sbin. Conclusion & Just My Opinion. Actually I don't have a strong opinion for mixertui in bin or sbin, if you or others[*] have some strong opinion I' ll change the directory. [*] This seems a discussion for some mailing list, maybe arch@ or ports@. Probably the point is not the philosophy but to define a formal guideline and then to update hier(7). Alfonso
From the current edition of hier(7): > /usr/ contains the majority of user utilities and applications > > bin/ common utilities, programming tools, and > applications … > sbin/ system daemons and system utilities that are > executed by users jbo@ and asiciliano@ although I'm not a developer, I do suspect that the above – plus a run of pkg provides /usr/local/sbin/ – will be enough to satisfy yourselves that /usr/local/sbin/mixertui is OK. ---- pkg provides /usr/local/bin/ might leave you wondering about the meaning of common (above), but you can probably close this report and ponder such things after the event. HTH