> On Tue, 2022-09-27 at 18:25 +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> > On 2022-09-27 Zack Weinberg <zack@owlfolio.org> wrote:
> > [...]
> > > What I am asking for is a schedule change: specifically, that the
> > > merged /usr transition not be allowed to proceed past the status
> > > quo as of two weeks ago (i.e. *before* init-system-helpers added
> a
> > > dependency on usrmerge|usr-is-merged) until after the dpkg bugs
> are
> > > fixed to the satisfaction of the dpkg maintainers.
> > [...]
> >
> > Hello Zack,
> >
> > Afaiui the only thing the change two weeks caused is an increased
> > percentage of usrmerged Debian installations.
> >
> > Afaict the problem is unchanged: There is a very large number of
> > usrmerged systems (every system installed with bullseye installer
> or
> > newer unless some very specific steps were taken to avoid this)
> which
> > are prone to bugs due to dpkg not having been changed *first*. This
> > number is of usrmerged systems is so large that we cannot mark them
> > as unsupported ("Please reinstall"). Whether this percentage is 25%
> > or 90% does not matter.
>
> You can easily revert any system having usrmerge installed with dpkg-
> fsys-usrunmess. This should be known by all Debian users, by some
> suitable channel.
>
> And for example the latest init-system-helpers release should add
> this
> to the package description (if not reverted). This applies to other
> present and future packages having usrmerge as a dependency too.
Please note that this will result in an unsupported system, as per CTTE
decision. It is important to note this, for the record. So no, that
will not be added anywhere, package description or otherwise, and in
fact the last time it was "made known by all Debian users" it caused
quite a lot of damage, and was forcefully reverted.
To elaborate, in practice this means that after bookworm, things can
start assuming that all systems are merged-usr, and it also means that
changes of any kind will very likely not be held back on the off-chance
that they might not work on unmerged systems (and no testing will be
required to detect that either). There are already taints in place to
detect unmerged systems.
In other words, one is of course free to do as they wish on their
systems, but they also get to keep the pieces.
--
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
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