Hi,
This thread has rather veered off the initial bug report.
On 11/05/2023 13:16, Simon Richter wrote:
Hi,
On 5/11/23 10:59, Sean Whitton wrote:
Dear ctte, please consider overruling the dpkg maintainer to include
the patch from #994388[1].
Currently dpkg contains code to emit the merged-/usr warning, that's
dead code on Debian, but which becomes active when packages from the
Debian archive are copied unmodified into derivatives.
The way I see it (but I'm not a dpkg maintainer), the current
implementation is correct, as dpkg does not support aliased directories,
but Debian has decided to use it in such an environment nonetheless. The
tech-ctte decision not to roll back usrmerge accepts responsibility for
this decision, so silencing the warning on Debian is correct, but no one
has accepted that responsibility for derived distributions.
Any derived distribution can easily go on record and request inclusion
in the list of distributions where this warning is suppressed, by typing
the phrase "Yes, I understand that this is a bad idea." into an email
client.
I have considerable sympathy for this point of view. Further, given
ongoing (and quite fruitful) discussion on how to resolve the
outstanding issues around /usr-merge and dpkg, I don't think the
question of dpkg's warning (and its unfortunate wording) is one that is
useful for the technical committee (and the dpkg maintainers) to be
spending time on right now.
I think I would feel differently if there were derivatives who had asked
the dpkg maintainers to likewise exclude their distro from the warning
had been rebuffed (though I suspect such folk will just be patching it
out in their own builds).
Likewise I would expect that once we have finished sorting out the
outstanding /usr-merge & dpkg issues that the warning would be removed.
But those scenarios aren't where we're at now, so I think the project
should continue to focus on moving ourselves to the point where dpkg
does support /usr-merge as implemented in Debian.
Regards,
Matthew