Wouter Verhelst writes: > On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 06:26:32AM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote: >> On Feb 19, Guillem Jover <guil...@debian.org> wrote: >> > For any pathname that has been hardcoded a symlink can be used for >> > backwards compat, nothing unlike /bin or /sbin here. This looks just >> > like a normal bug from a botched transition, nothing special. >> Creating symlinks in /bin and /sbin DOES NOT result in a merged-/usr >> system, because the content of /usr would not be decoupled anymore from >> the content of /. > > No, but it allows us to *transition* from the current situation to a > merged-/usr situation, *without* breaking the package manager's > expectations.
openSuSE tried to transition to merged-/usr that way seven years ago[1]. I booted a recent live system and noted that they are still stuck in the transitional state. I would not recommend following that example. [1]: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Usr_merge >> A merged-/usr system must have /bin /sbin /lib* symlinks to /usr. > > We can have a policy that by release X, any package installing anything > in /bin /sbin or /lib that is not a compat symlink is RC buggy. > > Once we've reached that point, we can drop the directories and convert > them to symlinks. At that point, dpkg can also ignore any request to > create the compat symlinks, and later on we can make it an RC bug to > create compat symlinks if we wish to no longer support non-merged-/usr. > > Yes, this approach takes more time, but it is an equally valid way to > move from unmerged /usr to merged-/usr, and is the approach that people > are advocating. It's not "the" approach that people are advocating; that would apply that there was consensus that the (singular) approach is the right way. I would recommend *not* following it given it wasn't successful for other distributions. The largest blocker for doing anything is that Debian hasn't agreed on making merged-/usr mandatory anyway. Ansgar
