On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 12:51 PM David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed 01 Jan 2020 at 18:48:00 (+0100), Sven Hartge wrote: > > David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > > > > > But this does follow the (snipped) comment 'the "/usr Merge" that > > > might hit a fan someday'. For those *not* preparing packages for > > > Debian and/or other distributions, can anyone express a downside > > > to usr-merge, ie for typical "user/consumers". > > > > For me the biggest downside was that "dpkg -S", "dlocate" and "apt-file > > search" and the web-equivalent stopped working reliably, because the > > final path in the filesystem is no longer the same as it is in the > > package. > > Yes, I notice that the bug (134758) dates back 18 years and originally > involved the old /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/bin/X11 symlink. It complicates > using dpkg -S to search for one specific path (in a script, say), but > for interactive use it's enough to remove the leading / to avoid > misses caused by usr-merge. (There are already misses caused by > alternatives, and files created at installation time.) > apt-file search by default uses --substring-match, but I expect > someone to post how you turn that option off, which I've never done. > > > It also broke some internal CI/CD where the wrong paths were used when > > the CD chroot was built with usr-merge active but the deployment target > > was not usr-merged. The same has happened for the Debian buildds. > > I thought I was avoiding that by excluding package-builders. Or is > this something else entirely? > > > And it also broke some 3rd party vendor packages which had the same > > directory in /lib and /usr/lib, but with different contents. > > What do these vendors do on conventional (non-Debian/non-linux) > systems that have ceased to have any /lib long ago? > > On Thu 02 Jan 2020 at 06:04:03 (-0500), Steve Litt wrote that usr-merge > causes problems with systems that are initramfs-free (and /usr is a > mounted filesystem). I don't think Debian has supported such systems > in a long while, so you're really on your own with creating and > booting those. > I'm glad I found this out! I have a Jessie System with a VERY small Root (2G), and separate /usr and /home Partitions on a different Hard Drive. I suspect that Buster wouldn't install well on this at all! :-) Thanks for the info. I enjoyed reading Bug Report 914897. Kenneth Parker
