Package: release.debian.org Severity: normal User: release.debian....@packages.debian.org Usertags: rm
Disclaimer: The maintainer of usrmerge disagrees with me on that. Several people convinced me that I did not have the power to reopen #863269 and that doing so was wrong, therefore I am opening this bug here to ask as suggested for an explicit decision of the release team that has the power to remove packages from stretch even when there is no bug open against the package. I am hereby asking for a decision that results in the closing of this bug by a member of the release team in time for the stretch release, either with or without removing usrmerge from stretch. While merged /usr seems to be the future and will likely be the default in buster, shipping the usrmerge package in stretch wouldn't bring real benefits to users while creating situations where the only proper solution for a user might be to reinstall. There are several known breakages with merged /usr (check the blockers of #86326), and these would have to be fixed for stretch. Additionally, there is also an unknown number of runtime bugs like #860523 where code makes path assumptions that break with merged /usr. And there is no good way to find these automatically, only a longer time of merged /usr as default in testing/unstable would find them. The worst part is that the merged /usr via "apt-get install usrmerge" is irreversible, and having to tell users of stable that they have to reinstall for reverting it would be a huge blow for the stable reputation of Debian.
