Re: merged /usr vs. symlink farms
Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:
> The fact that the supporters of a *filesystem layout* have been happy to
> dismiss and ignore this and have been pushing for what I think can be
> easily described as the worst ever "transition" done in Debian, very
> sadly, for me this whole topic marks a before and after in Debian, and
> has put my trust in the technical side of the project into question.
I agree that you've been pointing out potential problems for years and
that your warnings have been at least partly vindicated by the problems we
are indeed seeing.
My understanding (which may be entirely incorrect, in which case please
let me know what your preferred solution actually is!) is that your
preferred solution was to migrate individual packages. What I'm hearing
from the frequent threads in debian-devel is that a sufficient number of
Debian contributors have rejected that approach (for various reasons) as
to make that solution not viable. In other words, my reading of the
consensus is that this option has effectively been vetoed by the rest of
the project (noting that this veto was certainly not unanimous).
Please note that I'm not taking a position on the merits of that decision,
simply noting that, based on my reading of debian-devel, this is has what
has happened, and I do not believe it will be possible at this point to
convince the project as a whole to unwind usrmerge and go back to doing
individual package migrations.
Given that as a design constraint (we will not be doing this transition
via one-by-one changes to each package), what would you support as a good
architectural solution to this transition? Even ruling out that approach,
the design space seems large and flexible; surely there must be some
coherent way of doing this transition that does not require individual
action for each affected package and preserves some of the "be done with
it" design goals of the current usrmerge approach while avoiding the
problems you have pointed out.
I think it's obvious that any such design will require support from dpkg.
You're very understandably upset that people are insisting on a solution
that you feel is clearly incorrect, but I think that's also how the people
who are disagreeing with you are feeling, and as long as that's true on
both sides it's hard to see how we're going to arrive at a solution that
isn't going to make you even more unhappy. In order to break this
deadlock, I think we have to have a design discussion in the shared space
of mutually agreeable solutions and not (on all sides) retreat back to a
single preferred architectural decision and only point out the problems
with any other approach.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: