Re: merged /usr vs. symlink farms
On Sat, Aug 21, 2021 at 10:26:13AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> It bothers me that you believe "we've been doing this for a while and it
> didn't cause any problems, so let's just continue doing things that way
> even if the people who actually wrote the damn code say that path is
> littered with minefields and they're scared of what could happen when we
> finish the tranition this way" is a valid strategy. It goes against
> everything I was taught to do to write reliable software.
So as an expert, what's your recommendation about what is to be done?
Personally, I *don't* have a problem about telling people to manually
update dpkg, apt, and/or apt-get before they do the next major stable
release (maybe it's because this is something I do as a matter of
course; it's not that much extra effort, and I'm a paranoid s.o.b.,
and I know that's the most tested path given how Debian testing
works).
Other people think that is a terrible idea, to be avoided at all
costs. I don't understand why that is such a terrible outcome, since
I do it already, but perhaps I can be educated on that point.
In any case, I believe downsides of the symlink farm alternative are
greater than the downsides of other options:
* just living with the risk of potential corner cases which
might affect users when they do the bullseye -> bookworm
upgrade, since aparently the sky hasn't fallen with Ubuntu, or
* advise users to upgrade dpkg/apt/apt-get first when they do
the next release, with the strength of that advice depending
on how likely users are to suffer from a "mine" causing
their system to lose a limb or two.
Heck, if the minefield is that dangerous (and if so, why the *heck*
aren't Ubuntu users screaming from data loss, system instability,
etc?), perhaps you should advise the release managers that dpkg needs
to have fixes pushed out to Bullseye NOW! NOW! NOW! to eliminate the
potential imminent damage that you seem to be so fearful of our users
might get hit with.
Can you give more details about real life scenarios which is
triggering your fears, and whether there are ways we can mitigate
against those scenarios?
Best regards,
- Ted
Reply to: