Re: merged /usr considered harmful (was Re: Bits from the Technical Committee)
On 2021-07-20 Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2021-07-19 at 16:41:42 +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:
>> So what what is actually the roadmap after the bullseye release?
>> What is the way forward? Should I rather file bugs with patches
>> against individual packages to move their files from
>> /(sbin|bin|lib)/ to /usr/(sbin|bin|lib)/ or do we already have a
>> debhelper patch to do that move for us?
> Unfortunately, when the supporters of the merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs
> pushed their approach into the distribution, that meant that package
> stopped being able to ship compatibility symlinks under «/», and those
> needed to be "handled" in maintscripts (by reimplementing poorly and
> unsafely what dpkg is supposed to do). This means dpkg is not in the
> loop and cannot perform a safe upgrade moving these pathnames safely,
> as long as merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs is supported.
[...]
Hello,
Isn't this kind of crying over spilt milk? I also wish we never had ended
up with the buster/bullseye state where both unmerged and
merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs are fully supported. However there is now a
huge number of merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs installations out there and
we cannot make them magically disappear. Undoing
merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs would be very error-prone while afaiui we
have a relatively simple plan to get a clean merged /usr in bookworm or
bookworm +1:
1. Make merged-/usr-via-aliased-dirs the only supported layout and make
this information available to apt. (Like we did for multi-arch-support.)
2. After that individual packages can safely move files from / to /usr,
pre-depending on merged-usr-support.
cu Andreas
--
`What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are
so grateful to you.'
`I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
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