Hello,
On Sat 06 May 2023 at 09:47PM +01, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> On Sat, 6 May 2023 at 19:51, Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de> wrote:
>>
>> > - the moratorium on moving files from bin/ sbin/ lib/ _and_ to other
>> > packages at the same time is maintained from bookworm till trixie, and
>> > will lifted after trixie ships, and applies implicitly to all the
>> > ~2000 binary pkgs that are affected by the above
>>
>> While the CTTE placed the moratorium until the release of bookworm, the
>> release team extended it beyond, see
>> https://lists.debian.org/E1oCdQk-0005ge-Nr@respighi.debian.org. So you
>> need explicit agreement from the release team on your plan. Failing
>> that, any package that has been forcefully moved is immediately
>> rc-buggy due to failing a release team requirement.
>
> Of course the release team needs to be on board, no questions about
> that. But given the idea is to maintain their decision exactly as it
> stands I wouldn't imagine it would be an issue? Once again, the
> moratorium is explicitly about moving between locations _and_
> packages, in combination, not either/or. From that same email you
> linked:
>
> "Files moving their canonical location between / and /usr (details in
> [1]) *and* from one binary package to another binary package within
> one release cycle remain an RC issue unless dpkg supports it."
>
> I'm proposing to keep this in place as a general rule, with the new
> escape hatch that you devised as the only addition.
Actually, the morotorium is not explicitly only about moving between
both locations and packages. Firstly, the TC's morotorium does not have
the qualification, restricting *any* movements in data.tar.*:
The Technical Committee recommends that during the Debian 12
development cycle, the maintainers of individual packages should not
proactively move files from the root filesystem to the corresponding
locations in /usr in the data.tar.* of packages. Files that were in
/usr in the Debian 11 release should remain in /usr, while files
that were in /bin, /lib* or /sbin in the Debian 11 release should
remain in those directories. If files were moved from /bin, /lib*
or /sbin into /usr since the Debian 11 release, they should be moved
back to their Debian 11 locations.
Then secondly, the RT's message is ambiguous, because it says both that
they want the /TC's/ morotorium to remain in place, and also that files
moving between both locations and packages is an RC issue.
Until the RT's position is clarified, I think we should treat the
broader prohibition as what they require. The TC are going to discuss
this issue at our meeting on Tuesday, and one possible outcome is that
we reissue our version of the broader prohibition.
Stepping back:
I am far from being an expert on the details of merged-/usr. But one
thing I've noticed is that among the people who have spent the most time
looking into it, the majority think that simple fixes are not going to
be sufficient. Only a few people who have spent a lot of time on it
still think that the fixes that are required are relatively simple ones.
If the former group are wrong then the transition takes longer than it
needs to, but we don't lose any confidence in the state of our users'
installations.
If the latter group are wrong then we'll probably end up with a longer
transition anyway, and a worse situation for both our maintainers and
our users. And it's within one of the areas of Debian that we're most
proud of -- completely smooth upgrades between stable releases.
So, I think we should assume the people who are more worried are right,
for the time being. We lose little in doing so.
--
Sean Whitton
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