Thorsten Glaser <t...@mirbsd.de> writes: > There is absolutely no reason to force files to move, given they are now > aliased already *anyway*.
I think this is the relevant Policy point. I pretty strongly disagree with this, and I think we also have a consensus on the Policy list that, no, we need to force all the files to move. Obviously we shouldn't do that in a way that creates RC bugs, but that should be our goal. There has been a ton of discussion about why this is, and I'm not sure if you're already familiar with all of that and disagree or if you haven't been following the details (which is not a criticism; the discussions have been long and I also haven't been following all of the details for a while). But the core point is that dpkg doesn't understand that /bin is aliased to /usr/bin, and therefore if we keep shipping files in both /bin and /usr/bin, we are asking for a lot of trouble. The list of types of trouble is long and complicated and I won't try to reiterate all of the edge cases, but there are enough of them and they are hard enough to reason about that we do need to get all package files moved into /usr so that we can stop trying to hold this complicated problem in our heads. Essentially, right now, we're creating a dpkg database inconsistency with the file system, which was the original technical objection to usrmerge. The extensive work that has happened over the past months is to wrestle with the implications of that inconsistency and minimize its impact. One critical component of that work has been to transition every Debian package except base-files to only shipping things in /usr, because that removes entire classes of future problems. This does not completely resolve the inconsistency issues, since dpkg still doesn't fully understand that the paths are aliased, but my understanding is that it gets our packages into a state where those remaining problems shouldn't cause the more serious end of problems that we otherwise would have, and thus gets us into a basically stable position until dpkg can gain full understanding of the path aliasing. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
