Hi Luca, On Fri, Aug 02, 2024 at 04:17:43PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > Validating is of course necessary. If the worry is around changing the > dependencies of base-files, I would be happy to carry the dependency on > a new os-release binary package in init-system-helpers, which is > already Essential: yes. I already did something similar in Bookworm to > force all installations to become usrmerged, and I do not recall issues > with the bootstrapping order. This would be even easier in practice as > the new package would have a single file, no maintainer scripts, no > dependencies and no build dependencies. Would that solve your concerns?
No. You need to decide whether /etc/os-release is to be essential or not. If it is, then your proposed dependency in init-system-helpers does not cut it, because I can simply upgrade base-files before init-system-helpers and then my /etc/os-release is gone violating Debian policy. A more reliable mechanism for transitioning essential files is required. If it is not, then demoting it to Priority:required is an option. In this case, init-system-helpers should not depend on it and rather the priority would cause debootstrap to include it. On the flip side, that means that all users of os-release would need a dependency on "os-release | base-files (<< ...)". I suppose no work has been done to gauge the impact of this. I fear it's not that simple. Helmut
