Matthew Vernon wrote: > We don't support skip-upgrades, but in practice they can often be made > to work by an experienced administrator. > > For trixie, though, packages are going to be allowed to assume > merged-/usr, and the ongoing work to resolve the outstanding problems > around merged-/usr and dpkg is going to concentrate on making sure all > bookworm-trixie upgrades will work. But changes that could result in > file loss on a bullseye-trixie skip-upgrade will not be considered > bugs, so it would be good to particularly emphasise in the trixie > release notes that skip-upgrades to it are not supported, and that in > all circumstances administrators must upgrade to bookworm first.
This issue shouldn't be a major risk as long as admins know to install usrmerge as step one. (If they're upgrading direct from stretch then I suppose step zero is "find a copy of usrmerge".) Maybe a new warning-note thing at the top of section 4.2? Of course if they're doing skip-upgrades because they don't have time to read all those separate Release Notes then they're probably doomed... -- JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package