On 11/24/18 8:51 PM, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
Marco d'Itri wrote:On Nov 21, Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> wrote:How many long-running production systems do you think people have runusrmerge 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.
Based on reading the other messages in this thread, I changed my opinion. The new opinion is that any of the following outcomes is OK, with no specific preference:
1. mandatory usrmerge in Buster2. usrmerge available from somewhere for installation in Buster, but not installed on buildds, and dpkg-buildpackage should refuse to build anything if /usr is merged and the user does not say "please".
-- Alexander E. Patrakov