Re: [PATCH 00/20] Finish the work to stop hardcoding paths at build time

On a Tuesday in 2025, Daniel P. Berrangé via Devel wrote: > Over the years we've made various changes to stop hardcoding paths at > build time, but the work is incomplete. > > This bit us significantly in Fedora 42 where they have merged the 'sbin' > and 'bin' dirs together. In the build environment we have a clean > install where '/sbin' and '/usr/sbin' are simply symlinks to '/usr/bin'. > > Our meson.build logic preferentially looks in '/sbin' and '/usr/sbin' > to find programs, and thus it finds *all* binaries in '/sbin' and then > hardcodes this path. This happens even for binaries that have always > been in '/usr/bin' and NEVER '/sbin' or '/usr/sbin' > > On fresh Fedora installs this is fine as the symlinks match the build > environment. > > On upgraded Fedora installs, however, '/sbin' and '/usr/sbin' remain > separate directories and inside they symlink individual binaries, > if-and-only-if the binary was in '/sbin' in Fedora 41. > > Thus many of the binaries we found in /sbin don't actually exist and > libvirt thus breaks. > > There is really no reason why we should be harcoding any paths at > build time. virCommand happily uses virFindFileInPath for any paths > which are not already absolute. $PATH includes '/sbin' and '/usr/sbin' > when we're running privileged, and when unprivileged we shouldn't need > to run binaries from there. > Does anyone happen to remember the original reason? The only thing I can think of is saving the lookup time, but that has to be negligible compared to the cost of fork and the command actually doing something