On 2020-02-18 at 20:50, Guillem Jover wrote: > On Sun, 2020-02-16 at 11:59:56 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > >> I would be grateful if people who advocate transitioning >> individual packages, and people who consider the approach taken by >> usrmerge and debootstrap to be sufficient, could refer to their >> preferred route in a way that makes it clear which one they are >> advocating. Saying we should do a transition "properly" is >> tautologous - of course we should! - but when people disagree about >> what the proper way to do it is, it becomes an ambiguous >> recommendation that doesn't guide anyone to do the right thing. > > I've been consistently calling the concept of merging /* into /usr/* > as merged-/usr and the specific approach of using directory symlinks > as merged-/usr-via-symlinks (although I think that's confusing as > the other approach does use symlink farms), so I think using either > merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs or merged-/usr-via-symlink-dirs is more > clear (will be renaming the buildinfo tainted tag). The approach > I've been proposing I'd call merged-/usr-via-moves-and-symlink-farms > or something along those lines. As a tangent, because this has never made sense to me: Is there a reason this is all looking to merge /* into /usr/* instead of the other way around? The latter looks to me as if it would ultimately make it possible to drop the /usr directory entirely (once we've had a release or three in which it contains nothing but symlinks) - whereas the former means we'd have the extra four characters at the head of nearly every path to installed software forever, for no apparent benefit, and would also seem to mean we'd have to keep the symlinks in / around potentially forever, even after the transition has been complete for yonks. I'm not sure I'd support dropping /usr, but I don't think I can remember having ever run across (or come up with) any arguments against it which don't seem like they would also be arguments against doing this merge at all, so the fact that the merge is apparently being done in this direction has consistently puzzled me. Does keeping /usr have some kind of benefit in its own right which I'm not seeing, even for cases when it's on the root filesystem? (Answers in the forms of pointers to Websites, or even to archives of past discussion where this would be made clear, are entirely acceptable.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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