move to merged-usr-only?

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

Hi,

I would like to propose to plan to move to support merged-usr-only over
the following releases.  The motivation is bugs like [1] where upstream
developers just use `/usr/bin/rm` (or other binaries, or user scripts
using /usr/bin/bash, or ...) unconditionally; this was already a
motivation to adopt merged-/usr as a default for me.

As far as I know nothing broke catastrophically over the last releases
with merged-/usr.

Alternatively, a team could form that preemptively looks at such issues
and fixes them, ideally upstream.

So a possible idea would be to:

 - For Debian 12 (bookworm): make it mandatory to migrate old systems to
   merged-/usr on upgrade. Possibly by allowing the existing usrmerge
   program to run from the initramfs.

 - For Debian 13 (trixie): packages should no longer install to /bin,
   /sbin, /lib, but to the respective locations under /usr.

Ansgar

  [1]: https://bugs.debian.org/973853