On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 02:55:56PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
I don't believe supporting legacy installs *without doing the migration* is an option, or at least an option that we should take. We could theoretically make it work, but the ongoing burden to packagers and to our testing infrastructure would be high. It would be yet another obscure and irritating thing that you'd have to mess with when packaging and that was very hard to test, and we already have way too many of those. So yes, this is exactly the decision before us.
Then this needs to be a very explicit (and much better advertised) decision, and it needs a much, much better implementation. Pulling in usrmerge during an upgrade isn't going to cut it--we'd need some kind of pre-upgrade check that tells people what they need to fix before we break it. Designing this in a hurry less than two months before we start freezing seems incredibly ambitious.