Marco d'Itri wrote:
On Nov 21, Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> wrote:How many long-running production systems do you think people have run usrmerge on? I'd guess close to zero, since there is no advantage whatsoeverActually I have quite a lot personally, with exactly zero problems.On some of them I also enjoy advantages of merged-/usr, like having multiple containers share the same /usr.
I agree with the argument in this thread that usrmerge should be either Essential or not in Buster at all. I have no Debian systems in production, but the company that I have a contract with has some Ubuntu systems, and we are considering (as in: there is a successful PoC) the use of OSTree for deployment of some production systems. OSTree folks recommend merged /usr, so I do install usrmerge in the LXC container that is being used as a "golden" tree for deployment. And it works quite well for us with just a few extra moves and symlinks, and extlinux as the boot loader (to work around removal of GRUB2-related files from the Debian package).
So: my opinion is that I would prefer usrmerge in Essential in Buster, for the benefit of people who use OSTree for deployment, and to reduce divergence between Debian and Ubuntu plans.
-- Alexander E. Patrakov