Bug#1050001: Unwinding directory aliasing [and 3 more messages]
Dear Luca,
On 27/08/2023 03:16, Luca Boccassi wrote:
[things]
You've already been asked by a couple of people to moderate your tone in
this thread. I appreciate there is a lot of frustration around
/usr-merge, but your contributions are not helping with that at all. Nor
do they help us have a constructive discussion.
The DEP-17 work continues whilst this discussion is ongoing; this
discussion is not delaying that work.
I think it is fair to say that when ctte decided on /usr-merge it was
expected that a) the process would be reasonably straightforward and b)
dpkg could be taught to understand directory aliasing, so we would not
have to be doing things "behind dpkg's back", as it were.
I think the need for a releases-long moratorium on moving files and the
volume and depth of technical work represented by DEP17 demonstrate that
those expectations turned out not to be met.
Given that, it seems to me that a) warnings that "it's not that simple &
easy" were not FUD and describing them thus is unhelpful b) it's
reasonable to at least ask the question "given what we know now, are we
still sure this is the correct approach?"
Any such consideration must be mindful of the fact that the majority of
Debian installs are now /usr-merged, which means that the complexity of
unwinding such installs has to be a heavy factor in thinking about
alternative approaches.
I'm hopeful, but not certain, that the DEP17 work will get us to a
coherent state again by foxy (which still feels a long time off); I
don't think we should underestimate the work to be done in properly
completing /usr-merge.
This discussion has, I think, been broadly useful in clarifying some
folks' thinking in this area. I would very much like if we could keep it
focused on the technical matters.
Regards,
Matthew
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