Bug#1030040: release-notes: usrmerge and dist-upgrade
Package: release-notes
Severity: normal
We've already given users notice in previous release-notes that the
unmerged format won't be supported on bookworm; now, any users who
haven't yet installed usrmerge will get it automatically pulled in
during the dist-upgrade. The release-notes ought to mention the
recommended way of handling this.
Normally I'd say this was the kind of thing you're better off doing as
a separate sysadmin task *before* the day you do the dist-upgrade. On
the other hand, bookworm's usrmerge has a few cornercase fixes[1] that
release-notes readers who are using obscure btrfs features or the like
might want to take advantage of. So which approach should we be
recommending to unmerged upgraders?
a) Doing a combined dist-upgrade and usrmerge is so reliable that
everybody should simply do it this way (thus using the latest
usrmerge).
b) Users should check the list of bugfixes and if none of them apply
they should do the merge on bullseye before the dist-upgrade;
on the other hand if they want to use the bookworm usrmerge
they should let the dist-upgrade pull it in.
c) Combined dist-upgrade and usrmerge is not certified safe, so if
you need bookworm usrmerge it's better to upgrade your
sources, pull in just usrmerge and its dependencies (plus
perhaps the new apt, linux-image, etc), reboot, and *then*
carry on with the rest of the dist-upgrade.
d) Something else.
Whatever advice we end up giving, the same section could also mention
the detail that if you don't want all of usrmerge's dependencies
installed - not that there are many - you can replace it with the
special dummy package usr-is-merged on bookworm.
(I have done a couple of plain-sailing trial dist-upgrades, but my
testbed systems are already merged so I haven't had a chance to check
the various options.)
[1] "https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/u/usrmerge/usrmerge_35_changelog";
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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