Re: Bug#1035904: dpkg currently warning about merged-usr systems (revisited)
On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 09:14:53PM +0200, Ansgar wrote:
> On Tue, 2023-06-13 at 20:01 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > After discussing this at our monthly meeting, we concluded that the
> > technical committee isn't going to take action on this at the moment.
> > There's a legitimate technical consideration behind the warning, and
> > it's necessary for derivatives to ensure that they handle the
> > associated scenarios properly.
>
> Okay, I take that as "Debian doesn't care about derivatives".
> Suggesting users to revert to split-/usr *will* break stuff for users
> once more code Debian assumes merged-/usr.
With my non-CTTE hat on, I think this is a demonstration that Debian
*does* care about derivatives. It's important to ensure that derivatives
are aware of the subtle interactions between dpkg and usrmerge,
otherwise they may suffer from hard to diagnose issues on upgrades. The
message from dpkg says nothing about reverting to split-/usr, and
instead points at a wiki page. If our documentation on how to avoid
these issues is incomplete (ie, if we're only describing how to avoid it
by using split-/usr rather than describing the mitigations we've imposed
within Debian to avoid triggering the issues), perhaps a better approach
would be to improve that documentation? We don't benefit our users by
pretending there isn't a problem here.
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