Josh Triplett <j...@joshtriplett.org> writes: > I think it's appropriate for people to wait on such work until there's > guidance from the TC ensuring that such a patch will be accepted. > Otherwise, anyone spending time writing it is spending substantial > effort that may well be wasted.
I think this is a totally fair thing to be concerned about. Should such a patch exist -- with the obvious condition that I think it's quite reasonable to do several rounds of iteration on making that patch solid, ensuring there are tests, and so forth -- I think it's obvious that we should merge it given the previous TC decision. Of course, I'm not a TC member. It's difficult, procedurally, for the TC to do anything about a theoretical patch that someone could write but hasn't written. Particularly for dpkg, the details are important. I can think of some ways of supporting merged-/usr that I wouldn't support even while supporting the TC decision. We have various goals (such as being able to bootstrap entirely through package installation) that can be met while supporting merged-/usr but which do require design and care. If a concrete patch exists, the TC can (and has in the past) authorize an NMU to apply it. Obviously, we should try to avoid reaching that level of social and process confrontation if we can avoid it, but this is clearly within the TC's constitutional power via a maintainer override, which puts the discussion on somewhat firmer ground. But design of that patch is *not* within the TC's constitutional mandate. It may be useful to look at how multiarch support in dpkg was handled. That was quite painful and I really hope we don't end up following that path exactly, but it provides a concrete example of how Debian's processes can reach a resolution. I personally am still hopeful that we could do much better than the multiarch outcome and find a patch that meets the architectural criteria of the dpkg maintainer, but I'm fairly certain that we're not going to make any progress towards that goal without having working code, or at least a very detailed architecture, to start discussing and analyzing. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>