Chris G. Demetriou writes:
 > > Fair enough.  I know it used to be called /etc/rmt, I had assumed that
 > > was deprecated now.  Would someone in core care to express a
 > > preference on this issue of style, and then we can fix things
 > > accordingly?
 > 
 > my feeling on matters like this is that NetBSD should be as tolerant
 > as possible in terms of what it accepts, and as restrictive as
 > possible in terms of what it generates.

Then clearly dump and restore should be generating "/etc/rmt". Your
tape drive might, after all, be on an older host where rmt really is
/etc/rmt and nothing else. However, if that host doesn't have an
/etc/rmt, but would have found rmt in the path...

I'm pretty sure that in the past dump and restore sent "/etc/rmt" and
that therefore someone has deliberately made the change to "rmt". The
only reason I can speculate for this is that "/etc/rmt" is deprecated,
and rmt is now expected to be in the path.

 > In terms of what it accepts, for root, 'rmt' and /etc/rmt will be
 > accepted (as /usr/sbin is in the standard root .profile's path). 

Sorry, no.  Well, it *is* in the .profile, but as I noted in the PR,
that doesn't help because it's not a login shell spawning the rmt. It
works when root's shell is csh (because the path is also in root's
.cshrc), but not if it's sh.

 > For other users, it's not clear how much we can do; i don't think
 > it's wise to be adding /usr/sbin to the default path for other
 > users...

Agreed. But that's a site configuration problem, because by default
other users don't have perms on the tape devices anyway.

--
Dan.