Re: A summary of where I think we are on the technical side of the merged /usr discussion
On Tue, 17 Aug 2021 at 20:17, Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 8/17/21 8:02 PM, Simon McVittie wrote:
>
> > However, some people (most notably the dpkg maintainer, who has thought
> > about this more than most) argue that merged-/usr's "aliasing" symlinks
> > /bin -> usr/bin, etc. are unsupportable, and the only correct way to
> > consolidate static files to be physically located under /usr is to
> > gradually build up symlink farms below /bin and so on.
>
> I agree that it's likely the only thing we can do with the version of
> dpkg that we ship now, and that will have to handle the upgrade for any
> users that move from one stable release to the next provided there is no
> project consensus to deviate from "apt dist-upgrade" as the preferred
> method of upgrading to the next release.
That is the case only if the plan is to deprecate support for
external/third-party repositories/packages, since there's no way to do
the required per-package work on those, and this strategy can only
work (and that's a non-trivial assumption already, given so far it has
a 100% failure rate) if every single package that will ever be
installed on every single system is updated individually.
Also the "unsupportable" statement is kinda hard to reconcile with the
reality of this being default on Ubuntu for 2+ years, which uses the
very same dpkg. It would be very useful to have someone from Canonical
comment on what problems are there in reality? Launchpad shows only 2
bugs, which appears to be both corner cases:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usrmerge
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