Re: /usr/-only image
On Mon, 11 Sep 2023 at 08:58:09 +0200, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> An even bigger prerequisite is that many upstream projects does not yet
> support working without /etc or (orthogonally) reading their default
> configuration from /usr.
I agree that an "upstream first" approach is good here - even if we might
want Debian maintainers to backport upstream changes that haven't made it
into a release yet. Loading defaults from /usr is a behaviour change, and
many downstream maintainers are (IMO correctly) reluctant to make
Debian-specific behaviour changes for things that would ideally go
upstream but have not yet been accepted upstream, because that carries a
risk of the change never happening upstream and the Debian delta therefore
becoming permanent.
There are a couple of inter-related things here, which might make sense
to treat as separate topics.
Integration hooks
=================
Quite a lot of packages have some sort of integration hook, where package A
installs a file in a location "owned" by package B, to make the two
packages integrate nicely together. It's best if we can change package B
to load these integration hooks from /usr, and then systematically change
all examples of package A to install there.
Because this involves a large number of often trivially small files,
working on this will probably have the largest impact on the number of
files in /etc that would need special management for anyone who wants to
use a /usr-only filesystem image.
For instance, dbus-daemon (and other D-Bus implementations like
dbus-broker) used to require system services to install a snippet into
/etc/dbus-1/system.d. It's now deprecated for packages to install files
into that directory, and instead, they should install into
/usr/share/dbus-1/system.d, reserving /etc/dbus-1/system.d for sysadmin
overrides.
The steps to take here are:
1. Change package B to load from /usr in addition to /etc. This should
usually be done upstream, because it's a behaviour change.
(For instance where B = dbus-daemon, we did this in 2015.)
If multiple packages all load from the same location (like dbus-daemon
and dbus-broker) then all of them need this change.
2. For each package A, move the integration/configuration snippet from
/etc to /usr. This should ideally be done upstream too, but it's usually
straightforward (low maintenance cost) to do this in our packaging,
and it doesn't necessarily *need* to happen upstream.
Configuration defaults
======================
Some packages rely on their own configuration existing in /etc. For these
packages, ideally they'd try loading from /etc as highest priority, but
fall back to /usr as a lower-priority location. This is a
package-by-package change, and probably best achieved upstream.
smcv
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