Re: merged-/usr-via-symlinks damage control (was Re: usrmerge -- plan B?)
Julian Andres Klode <jak@debian.org> writes:
> Having symlinks in /bin and so on would be unclean: We'd have to maintain
> one symlink per binary in /usr. This is a lot of symlinks.
Does the quantity of symlinks matter?
> We also cannot ever get rid of them - it would break the property.
Well, on any given system, once every file in /bin was a symlink to the
same-named file in /usr/bin and we had some guarantee that no new packages
would break this property, we could in theory replace the entire directory
with a symlink. Doing that feels like it would require new primitives in
the package management software, though, and it might be hard to do
safely. (It would also create a break point where packages from before
that flag day could no longer be installed on the system.)
> It also fails to handle subdirectories in lib{exec}. We do want
> /usr/lib/systemd and /lib/systemd to be the same.
You can use the same approach recursively and symlink every file. This is
an old package manager trick that I think Nix is still using to this day,
and which was used to some success by such things as GNU stow (albeit for
different reasons).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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