Re: merged-/usr transition: debconf or not?
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021, at 3:23 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2021, at 8:06 PM, Luca Boccassi wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2021-11-18 at 16:23 -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>>> Luca Bocassi wrote:
>>> ...
>>>> nobody has actually seen [the file disappearance bug]
>>>> happen, to the best of my knowledge.
>>>
>>> I already explained why that doesn't prove the bug is a non-issue.
>>> To the contrary; it means there is an enormous installed base of
>>> systems where the bug is latent, waiting to cause problems under
>>> conditions which we can reasonably expect to occur shortly after
>>> the release of bookworm.
>>
>> Why would the release of bookworm make any difference?
>
> Up until the release of bookworm, all Debian packages must be
> constructed on the assumption that they _might_ be unpacked on a
> system that has not yet been converted to merged /usr. Particularly
> for priority-required packages, this means that no one will be moving
> files from /bin, /lib, etc to /usr in the bookworm cycle.
>
> Post-bookworm, if nothing changes, that assumption will no longer be
> in force, and people who maintain packages that install files into /
> will want to simplify their packaging by installing everything in /usr
> instead. If they also want to change the binary packages that ships
> some of those files at any point in the same release cycle -- kaboom.
After having caught up on the thread, I see that the conditions required
to trigger the bug are somewhat more complicated, but the point remains:
particularly for the packages where a lost file could render the system
unbootable, changes that would trigger the bug have been deferred until
post-bookworm, *and* we can reasonably expect the maintainers of those
packages to *want* to make changes with a high risk of triggering the bug.
I imagine the coreutils maintainers are looking forward to getting rid
of their list of programs that go in /bin, and the extra debian/rules
logic to go with it, for instance
(https://sources.debian.org/src/coreutils/8.32-4.1/debian/rules/#L16).
zw
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