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Re: merged /usr



On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 10:16:57AM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>  Unless the intention is to deprecate allowing to change /etc/apt/sources.list and mandating that only hard-coded official Debian repositories can be used on Debian installations, of course, which would be, uh, interesting to see?

That is ironic given the current 'transition' plan is to have the
release notes nudge all people who upgrade instead of reinstall their
systems, chroots and what not to please do it for all of them by hand
at a to be specified flag day someday between now and bookworm
freeze – while a buster user might be able to do it now by hand,
a repository admin has no such luxury as their packages have to continue
to work until the flag day, so no dice embedding /usr/bin/grep, but
after the flag day all dependencies could embed it breaking the unmerged
build chroot still only having /bin/grep, so I hope we are picking a day
on which every repository owner has some free time to do the flip… or
well, deprecate them all as you suggest. As an APT dev I would approve.

Not sure why you are singling out Debian as fine though, given we have
the very same problem for our fleet of buildds and porterboxes, some DSA
owned and some not. Thank goodness binary uploads by maintainers are
a thing of the past never to be seen or even required for… oh, right…

But yeah, upgrades. Minor problem.
Nothing which can't be fixed with a good reinstall.


To be clear: I couldn't care less about the if and how of /usr-merge.
I do appreciate that some plans have a better upgrade experience though,
not only as a user, but as dev as failed upgrades tend to be attributed
to apt –– and I am a bit shocked we are fine with flag days nowadays.
In the good old MultiArch days (that is a decade ago already!) a flag
day wasn't even seriously considered an option desperate the costs. How
times change… so it is okay now if I finally axe aptitude, right? :P
(I am joking, I still think doing it this way was the right move – and
 the bigger cost is arch:all not being M-A:foreign by default anyhow)


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

P.S.: I picked out only this line as I think most of the rest is more
or less discussed to death already in other sub-threads and at times
actually objectively wrong – like the amount of packages shipping
something in /bin and co – so I don't feel like rehashing those. Not
that I feel like wanting to discuss this point either, I just find it
hideous to use a "what about upgrades?!?" hyperbole in this situation.

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