Re: usr-merge, was Re: Back to systemd [was: Re: New list for Raspbian? (was: Re: systemdq)]
On Wed 01 Jan 2020 at 18:48:00 (+0100), Sven Hartge wrote:
> David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > But this does follow the (snipped) comment 'the "/usr Merge" that
> > might hit a fan someday'. For those *not* preparing packages for
> > Debian and/or other distributions, can anyone express a downside
> > to usr-merge, ie for typical "user/consumers".
>
> For me the biggest downside was that "dpkg -S", "dlocate" and "apt-file
> search" and the web-equivalent stopped working reliably, because the
> final path in the filesystem is no longer the same as it is in the
> package.
Yes, I notice that the bug (134758) dates back 18 years and originally
involved the old /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/bin/X11 symlink. It complicates
using dpkg -S to search for one specific path (in a script, say), but
for interactive use it's enough to remove the leading / to avoid
misses caused by usr-merge. (There are already misses caused by
alternatives, and files created at installation time.)
apt-file search by default uses --substring-match, but I expect
someone to post how you turn that option off, which I've never done.
> It also broke some internal CI/CD where the wrong paths were used when
> the CD chroot was built with usr-merge active but the deployment target
> was not usr-merged. The same has happened for the Debian buildds.
I thought I was avoiding that by excluding package-builders. Or is
this something else entirely?
> And it also broke some 3rd party vendor packages which had the same
> directory in /lib and /usr/lib, but with different contents.
What do these vendors do on conventional (non-Debian/non-linux)
systems that have ceased to have any /lib long ago?
On Thu 02 Jan 2020 at 06:04:03 (-0500), Steve Litt wrote that usr-merge
causes problems with systems that are initramfs-free (and /usr is a
mounted filesystem). I don't think Debian has supported such systems
in a long while, so you're really on your own with creating and
booting those.
Cheers,
David.
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