Re: merged-/usr transition: debconf or not?
Luca Bonassi wrote:
> may I also remind participants in this thread that according to our
> Constitution (2.1), no project member is obliged to do work on
> anything they don't want to
Yes, and it follows that the people who want a change to happen are
the people who will have to do the work to make that change happen,
including fixing any bugs that are exposed by that change. If they
don't want to do that work, and nobody else does either, then maybe
the change isn't going to get done.
As I said in the previous thread about this, I personally don't care
whether merged-/usr ever actually happens. It is not relevant to what
I use Debian for. So I am not motivated to do any work to make it
happen.
But I do very much care that the transition isn't botched, and right
now it looks like the greatest risk of the transition being botched
comes from proponents who are trying to rush to the end state without
fixing all the bugs exposed in the process. Since one of the exposed
bugs involves files going missing from Required and Essential packages
upon seemingly-unrelated upgrades, during some indefinite period
*after* the transition, you can, I hope, see why I feel it necessary
to make a stink.
> [The bug where files disappear from packages upon being moved from
> /bin to /usr/bin or vice versa, after / is a symlink to /usr] to the
> best of my knowledge has not been actually observed in the wild
> despite this setup being the default for 100% of Ubuntu users who
> install/upgrade to 21.10, 100% of new Ubuntu installs since ~2018
> and an unspecified number of Debian installs being the default in
> our installer too for the past two stable releases
There's a very good reason for that: people aren't doing the package
changes that trigger the bug, yet. They can't, because that would
break systems where /usr hasn't been merged. If the bug is not fixed
I expect it will start causing problems in unstable *after* bookworm,
since (as I understand the current transition plan) bookworm+1
development is the earliest that package maintainers may assume /bin
is a symlink.
The existence of the bug is not in question. A step-by-step
reproduction recipe was posted in the previous thread. Losing files
from Essential packages when they are upgraded is severity:critical.
Therefore: either someone fixes the bug, or the transition will have
to be canceled. It appears to me that the tech ctte agrees with all
of this.
> I dare say it would help their cause a great deal more, instead of
> rekindling flame wars on a mailing list,
Marco is the person who restarted the argument. I will cheerfully
drop the subject again as soon as Marco acknowledges that (a) the bug
exists, and (b) it is a hard blocker for the transition.
zw
p.s. apologies for breaking threading, i'm not subscribed to d-d
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