Hi Luca, On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 10:24:03PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > Also worth noting that a couple of days ago, the author wrote on > #debian-devel that some time ago the patch was presented to the dpkg > maintainer, who rejected it with an answer along the lines of the usual > "usrmerge is broken by design", with no further comment.
That is unfortunate. If I remember correctly, there was some more concrete criticism that is still entirely unaddressed in the current form. dpkg is both a Debian package and an upstream project used by multiple distributions with different needs. Guillem generally cares for the needs of other distributions. As a result, dpkg separates policy from mechanism in a lot of places. The patch at hand however fully intermingles them. Which directories are to be aliased could be a vendor-specific configuration and should be encoded as such. That kind of separation of concerns has not happened at all. It should also be noted that the patch describes itself as incomplete. No attempt at completing it seems to have been made thus far. > So, what is the next step? Will the those on this thread who asserted > they think a correct patch would be accepted without issues try and > take it forward themselves? I don't think anyone claimed that incomplete patches would go in without issues. Much to the contrary. My experience with sending patches to dpkg is that they do go through multiple rounds due to high quality feedback. The problem I see here is that communication between patch author and dpkg maintainer does not work and thus no progress is being made. To be honest, the current form of the patch is a testament of how poorly the /usr-merge proponents have spent the last five years on an issue that was known for more than ten years. The more and more I have to deal with the /usr-merge the more I get disappointed by how badly this transition is planned and carried out. In principle, the technical merits seem solvable to me, but the total failure on the process level leaves me wish for a revert. I am really surprised that instead of improving the process, you carry on with that destructive attitude. Given this, it seems unsurprising that Guillem does not want to interact with you. Of course that's not an excuse for implementing the recent changes to dpkg. The communication is clearly failing on both sides, which is why we're here at the ctte again. The way I see it is that changes need to be well supported regardless of how superior their technical approach is. If that's not the case, we should not have that change and continue using what has worked in the past. I'm sitting on such a change on my own and do not trying to push it into Debian hard even though I am strongly convinced of its superiority, because doing so would impose unreasonable cost on others. There is a social aspect here that is presently failing hard. Helmut
