Re: merged /usr considered harmful (was Re: Bits from the Technical Committee)
On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 01:15:37PM +0200, Magissia wrote:
> In this case, this page should be updated to reflect the fact it is not
> broken.
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/MergedUsr
Logic does not quite work that way. Just because we selected that way of
doing things doesn't imply it would not be broken. Arguably, if it
wasn't broken, there would not have been a need to defer the decision to
the CTTE as there would have been consensus on choosing the non-broken
way already. The CTTE was tasked to choose the less broken one of two
broken options and it did.
>From a dpkg pov, the aliasing technique continues to be broken and the
solution continues to manifest as unintuitive behaviour and related
issues. Calling that broken sounds fair to me.
The thing that makes me a little grumpy about this is that the
proponents of the /usr merge continue stuffing ever more fingers into
their ears when faced with problems. I for one wouldn't care as much if
the /usr merge wasn't that much of a time sink to me. For instance, I
happened to be one of the first affected users of dpkg-shlibdeps ceasing
to work. I'd really like to ignore the whole mess and leave it to
others (and that includes not opposing it).
I also note that there is a subtle difference between those who disagree
with the /usr merge and those that disagree with its implementation
strategy. The former ones seems like a very small minority to me. As a
result, reiterating the "why" is kinda pointless as there already seems
to be consensus on that front. As for the how, there seems to be rough
consensus that all implementation strategies are broken one way or
another. We just get to pick the least painful one and deferred the
choice to the CTTE.
Maybe someone could fix #858331 et al and we can move on?
Helmut
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