Re: sh(1) and ksh(1) default PATH

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Aug 13, 2022 at 08:59:07PM +0000, nia wrote:
 > A problem many new NetBSD users encounter is that a default shell
 > without an initialized home directory containing a ~/.profile
 > does not include some system PATH entries that would otherwise be
 > provided from /etc/skel/.profile.
 > [...]

There's another wrinkle, which is that /usr/local and /usr/pkg should
come before /usr... except that this point is apparently contentious
and has been bikeshedded to death in the past with no consensus
reached.

(If there are no bins with duplicate names, it doesn't matter. If
there are, it does. Argument 1: the point of installing something in
/usr/local or /usr/pkg that's also in base is to replace the version
in base, not for it to be inaccessible to ordinary use. Argument 2:
the stuff in base is canonical and it's wrong for random whatnot to
arbitrarily override it. I admit I don't fully understand argument 2
and I suspect it may partly be a leftover response dating from System
V installs with world-writable /usr/local.)

But if we're going to paste new copies of the default path into more
places we should really try to straighten this out first, or have a
setting for the order somewhere.

There's already too many copies as it is, and they aren't all the
same. The one in etc/login.conf is missing /usr/local/sbin, for
example.

I am not clear on why <paths.h> has both _PATH_DEFPATH and
_PATH_STDPATH and why they're different (one potentially has RESCUEDIR
in it, whatever that is, and the other has sbin dirs; and neither has
/usr/X11R7/bin) but probably that should be clarified and then all the
others derived directly from there rather than repasted.

(Also, being a system header, paths.h shouldn't be trafficking in
symbols like RESCUEDIR that belong to the application namespace. I am
guessing that RESCUEDIR is sometimes set to /rescue? This should get
sanitized.)

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost