Hi Francois, On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 04:05:55PM -0800, Francois Marier wrote: > On 2023-11-27 at 03:54:16, Helmut Grohne (hel...@subdivi.de) wrote: > > I don't have time to update the patch right now. Let me promise an update > > this week, ok?
I am very sorry to break this promise. It's complicated. > My apologies for not responding earlier, but this is a rather thorny problem > to solve and I have not had the mental "bandwidth" to dig into this yet. > > I wanted however to express my sincere appreciation for all of the work you > have put into both understanding this problem and coming up with a solution. Well, in essence I am driving the completion of the /usr-merge transition. You may argue that I have caused all this trouble even if that is an oversimplification. The way you support solving this matter is appreciated. I fully understand that fixing this requires significant effort that you cannot just provide spontaneously. So there will be no patch for now, because there still are unsolved problems. While looking into Emilio's problem and fixing the version constraints, I figured that test cases are failing. In particular, there are situations where dpkg unpacks systemd-sysv from unstable at a time where molly-guard from bookworm is still unpacked. This causes files from systemd-sysv to be irrevocably lost. I fear we're going back to the drawing board. If you want details, try #1057199, but I caution that it's not for the faint of heart and I already have apt and dpkg developers assist, which is awesome. Among the ideas circulated by multiple DDs, the one that seems most promising to me was from Julian Andres Klode. He suggests that we add a "barrier" package "usrmerge-support". It would have versioned Conflicts with molly-guard and systemd-sysv would declare Pre-Depends on usrmerge-support. This approach can be used to emulate the semantics that I hoped to get from Conflicts, because Pre-Depends imply that at the time usrmerge-support.postinst runs, molly-guard must be removed or upgraded and systemd-sysv is not yet unpacked. Totally untested though. I fear there is not much you can do at this point. Let me also clarify that I am not really looking into this for molly-guard's sake. For one thing, molly-guard provides an instance of a problem class repeated multiple times in the archive. I hope that once we get molly-guard right, the other instances become easier. For another, your responsiveness and care is appreciated. Stay tuned Helmut
