Hi, This thread has rather veered off the initial bug report. On 11/05/2023 13:16, Simon Richter wrote:
Hi, On 5/11/23 10:59, Sean Whitton wrote:Dear ctte, please consider overruling the dpkg maintainer to include the patch from #994388[1].Currently dpkg contains code to emit the merged-/usr warning, that's dead code on Debian, but which becomes active when packages from the Debian archive are copied unmodified into derivatives.The way I see it (but I'm not a dpkg maintainer), the current implementation is correct, as dpkg does not support aliased directories, but Debian has decided to use it in such an environment nonetheless. The tech-ctte decision not to roll back usrmerge accepts responsibility for this decision, so silencing the warning on Debian is correct, but no one has accepted that responsibility for derived distributions.Any derived distribution can easily go on record and request inclusion in the list of distributions where this warning is suppressed, by typing the phrase "Yes, I understand that this is a bad idea." into an email client.
I have considerable sympathy for this point of view. Further, given ongoing (and quite fruitful) discussion on how to resolve the outstanding issues around /usr-merge and dpkg, I don't think the question of dpkg's warning (and its unfortunate wording) is one that is useful for the technical committee (and the dpkg maintainers) to be spending time on right now.
I think I would feel differently if there were derivatives who had asked the dpkg maintainers to likewise exclude their distro from the warning had been rebuffed (though I suspect such folk will just be patching it out in their own builds).
Likewise I would expect that once we have finished sorting out the outstanding /usr-merge & dpkg issues that the warning would be removed.
But those scenarios aren't where we're at now, so I think the project should continue to focus on moving ourselves to the point where dpkg does support /usr-merge as implemented in Debian.
Regards, Matthew