Dear Luca,

On 27/08/2023 03:16, Luca Boccassi wrote:

[things]

You've already been asked by a couple of people to moderate your tone in this thread. I appreciate there is a lot of frustration around /usr-merge, but your contributions are not helping with that at all. Nor do they help us have a constructive discussion.

The DEP-17 work continues whilst this discussion is ongoing; this discussion is not delaying that work.

I think it is fair to say that when ctte decided on /usr-merge it was expected that a) the process would be reasonably straightforward and b) dpkg could be taught to understand directory aliasing, so we would not have to be doing things "behind dpkg's back", as it were.

I think the need for a releases-long moratorium on moving files and the volume and depth of technical work represented by DEP17 demonstrate that those expectations turned out not to be met.

Given that, it seems to me that a) warnings that "it's not that simple & easy" were not FUD and describing them thus is unhelpful b) it's reasonable to at least ask the question "given what we know now, are we still sure this is the correct approach?"

Any such consideration must be mindful of the fact that the majority of Debian installs are now /usr-merged, which means that the complexity of unwinding such installs has to be a heavy factor in thinking about alternative approaches.

I'm hopeful, but not certain, that the DEP17 work will get us to a coherent state again by foxy (which still feels a long time off); I don't think we should underestimate the work to be done in properly completing /usr-merge.

This discussion has, I think, been broadly useful in clarifying some folks' thinking in this area. I would very much like if we could keep it focused on the technical matters.

Regards,

Matthew

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