On Sun, 2021-08-22 at 11:08 +0200, Ansgar wrote: > Hi Guillem, > > On Sun, 2021-08-22 at 00:11 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote: > > There was talk about the huge amount of symlinks required in a > > symlink > > farm setting, but that might have been true for a scenario where > > those > > symlinks would have been handled automatically and transparently. > > To get a filesystem layout equivalent to merged-/usr via symlinks > farming *every* package shipping files in at least /usr/bin, > /usr/sbin > and possibly some of /usr/lib would need to include symlinks in /bin, > /sbin, /lib. This would affect far more packages than updating the > packages currently shipping files in /bin, /sbin and /lib* to ship > these under /usr instead. > > Note that on a merged-/usr system it is fine, and will be fine > forever, > to use /bin/python3 instead of /usr/bin/python3. > > If this is not done, the layouts are even more different. So they > should be named differently to avoid people confusing them as minor > variants of the same: maybe merged-/usr and partially-symlink-farmed- > root (as not all compatibility symlinks exist). > > > The huge majority of files under /lib* (which is the actual bulk of > > them) > > should require no symlink farms. Many of the ones under /bin and > > /sbin > > (we are talking about around 240 packages here) might be switchable > > w/o > > compat symlinks after careful consideration (or not…), many of the > > ones > > that require symlinks would need these just for a period of time, > > Removing any symlink will cause software to break. > > There was recently one such instance with `run-parts` getting moved > to > /usr/bin. Is your proposal to repeat this for every binary in /bin > and > /sbin (except possibly some selected ones) at one point in time? > There seems no realistic way to find/fix all software affected by > this > beforehand, especially software outside of Debian. What is your > proposal to handle this? > > Note that this breakage only happens with your newly proposed > partially-symlink-farmed-root filesystem layout that you propose > instead of merged-/usr. > > > and > > only a handful would remain (the ones that are part of standard > > interfaces, which I'd expect would be mostly shells?). I think the > > amount > > of symlinks currently provided by f.ex. lvm2 and e2fsprogs combined > > would > > amount to more symlinks than what we would eventually end up with > > TBH. > > So your proposal is to adopt a partially-symlink-farmed-root layout > and > never switch to merged-/usr? Sure, in that case SuSE failing to move > from partially-symlink-farmed-root to merged-/usr is not an argument > against that. But it still is a good argument against adopting > partially-symlink-farmed-root as a way to get to merged-/usr. > > What are the advantages to moving to a new filesystem layout used > only > by Debian which introduces incompatibilities with other > distributions? > > Are there further disadvantages we have not yet found? > > > Luca posted a mess of disinformation. > [...] > > Or there's the following for example: > > > > > IN particular, most systems are usrmerged today, and while these > > > bugs > > > are annoying, many people get along just fine. > > > > That would imply that most people have either gone out of their way > > to > > explicitly install and run usrmerge or they have reinstalled from > > scratch. I cannot believe the first to be of any significance, the > > second would put into question why we bother supporting release > > upgrades > > (after all many other distros do not support that, we perhaps > > should > > catch up with what the rest of the world is doing!). > > Various distributions outside of Debian seem to recommend installing > usrmerge on upgrade, for example Ubuntu or Linux Mint, with Ubuntu > also > pulling in the usrmerge package on upgrades by default. So by now > there > likely is a significant population of such users. > > I also don't see people doing new installations as a problem: people > not only using Debian on existing installations that might be a > decade > old, but also deploying it on new systems is a good thing. I don't > think people doing so has any implications to question supporting > upgrades or not. (Besides totally new systems there are of course > other valid reasons to start from a clean slate instead of upgrading > an > existing system such as having a documented state or just automated > deployment.) > > To be honest the conjecture that the number of people having > installed > Debian or Ubuntu or other Debian-based distributions in the last few > years is insignificant and can be totally ignored feels rather far > fetched just to support an outcome you want to see true. We would > have > much, much larger problems for the future of Debian and Debian-based > distributions than merged-/usr if this was true. So if you have any > support for this claim, I'm interested in seeing it. > > Ansgar Indeed it seems a strange claim to make - new users and new machines do exist. And for non-user deployments (cloud, servers) installations are common workflow too. Do we have statistics to show the number of downloads of Debian images for Buster and Bullseye? I tried (briefly) looking, but couldn't find any. I assume Canonical does not divulge these numbers for business reasons, but happy to be disproven on that. -- Kind regards, Luca Boccassi
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