Fedora 29's User PATH Will Prioritize Local User Binaries

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 25 June 2018 at 01:11 PM EDT. 22 Comments
FEDORA
There have been several controversial Fedora 29 changes this cycle like hiding GRUB by default and catering i686 packages to x86_64 while another one was approved today at the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

The latest approved feature for Fedora 29 that's been met by some controversy in user/developer discussions is on changing the prioritization of some paths within the user PATH environment variable. Rather than ~/.local/bin and ~/bin currently appearing at the end of the PATH paths, with Fedora 29 they will be set to the front. This gives these local user paths higher priority over the system-wide paths when it comes to looking for commands on the system.

Fedora developers have wanted to change this so when a user-installed tool is installed, it won't possibly be blocked behind a system-wide tool. This prioritization change also matches the behavior of what's done on Ubuntu and Debian, among other distributions.

But some have been opposed to this change if compromised/fraudulent tools become injected into those user paths they could unknowingly to the user overtake the system-wide tools/programs. But upstream believes there is no security concerns since users can already modify PATH on their own and so if a rogue actor were to drop in new executables into the user home directory, they could already be modifying PATH or accessing other user data.

More details on this approved change via this Wiki page.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week