Re: merged /usr vs. symlink farms
Tomas Pospisek <tpo2@sourcepole.ch> wrote:
> On 22.08.21 00:11, Guillem Jover wrote:
>> I'm personally just not seeing such consensus, despite the attempts of
>> some to make it pass as so. My perception is that this topic has become
>> such a black hole of despair, that people that take issue with it, are
>> simply stepping away.
...
> I do not really care which solution will be chosen. I hope it will
> be one that doesn't break my system(s) too hard so I'll be able to
> ask a search engine and follow the hints and instructions.
I'm just a user, but this seems like the right moment for me to speak up:
Whether or not / and /usr ever get merged *doesn't affect me as a
user.* All the stuff I use will be in my $PATH either way. The
benefits, AIUI, are all for people developing or packaging software
that has to be compatible with many different Linux distributions, but
does not care about portability to non-Linux environments. That
simply isn't me. So I don't care if the transition happens or not,
nor about the timeframe, and I'd *like* to not have to care about how
it gets done.
What I *do* very much care about is whether I can trust package
installation (of official, stable packages) to not break my systems,
and the way this discussion is going, it seems like I might not be
able to, and yes, that is disheartening.
The chief dpkg maintainer has given clear technical reasons why the
approach taken by usrmerge risks breaking people's systems. There is
a proof-of-concept in this very thread, demonstrating that the bugs
are real. From where I'm sitting, that should have been the end of
the argument. Hard stop on further merge-related changes in unstable
until a transition plan has been worked out that *won't* tickle dpkg
bugs; if that means waiting another release cycle in order to ship
dpkg bugfixes, *so be it*. (I reiterate that as a user I don't care
whether this transition ever actually happens.) Maybe even revert to
non-merged mode in the installer and drop usrmerge from testing and
stable, as a precaution.
But somehow what I see happening instead, is that Guillem's concerns
are being brushed aside, demoralizing him to the point where, if it
were me in his shoes, I would have resigned from the entire project;
and half the posters in this thread are raring to push ahead with a
transition that has a nonzero chance of wrecking one of my servers the
next time unattended-upgrades does its thing. (If I understand the
issue correctly, it *could* bite on a point upgrade or even a security
patch of any system that has already been transitioned the way
usrmerge/d-i do it, including all fresh bullseye and now also bookworm
installations.) That's a horrifying failure of both technical and
social project management.
I used the word "nonzero" in the last paragraph intentionally.
I don't want to hear any probabilistic arguments why everything should
be fine. I want a transition plan that *guarantees* no breakage.
That's what Debian has given us end-users for 20+ years and I hate
that I might have to worry about not getting it again.
And I think several people here owe Guillem an apology.
zw
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