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Re: merged /usr considered harmful (was Re: Bits from the Technical Committee)



On Wed, 2021-07-14 at 23:40 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Wed, 2021-07-14 at 19:54:56 +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> > Sean Whitton dixit:
> > > * #978636 move to merged-usr-only?
> > > 
> > >  We were asked to decide whether or not Debian 'bookworm' should
> > >  continue to support systems which are not using the merged-usr
> > >  filesystem layout.  We decided that support should not continue beyond
> > >  Debian 'bullseye'.
> > 
> > What? WHAT? WHAT?
> > 
> > >  The decision is captured here:
> > >  <https://bugs.debian.org/978636#178>
> > 
> > No reason provided either. This stinks. I’m v̲e̲r̲y̲ disappointed.
> > Debian is becoming untenable. Years ago, I had hoped it won’t.
> 
> I've been meaning to send a note about this for some time now, but
> as I feel it keeps getting ignored, it always seems a bit pointless.
> 
> But in any case, given that merged-usr-via-aliased-dirs is not really
> supported by dpkg anyway, it is broken by design [B], I have no
> intention whatsoever to break any of my systems with such layout going
> forward, I'm thus planning to spend any necessary volunteer time
> implementing any fix, workaround or solution required to avoid having
> to use it, in detriment of other Debian volunteer time. I already
> started some time ago with dpkg-fsys-usrunmess(8), present already in
> the upcoming bullseye release.
> 
> [B] <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/FAQ#Q:_Does_dpkg_support_merged-.2Fusr-via-aliased-dirs.3F>
> 
> Thanks,
> Guillem

Hi,

As it has been said and written many times already, in reality this is
not broken by design at all and in fact it is the only successful
strategy that has been deployed by other distros - it's what is being
called merged-usr-via-moves-and-symlink-farms that is broken. We can
say this with certainty because both approaches have been tried, so
there's actual real-world data to look at. Just go look at the absolute
mess that Suse got themselves into by following that solution - a 10-
years-long massive half-done-never-finished headache that took an
inordinate amount of work to back out of, and move to the actual
working solution that everybody else are using - merged-usr-via-
aliased-dirs. On the other hand Fedora/RHEL had a smooth and simple
transition using merged-usr-via-aliased-dirs, and that was the end of
it.

Dpkg has some very minor bugs that rpm/dnf/yum/zypper/whatever do not
suffer from. So what? It is perfectly normal as it's software and all
softwares have bugs. They could be fixed, worked around, or ignored,
like all other bugs.

-- 
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi

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