On Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:55:06 +0000 Andy Smith <a...@strugglers.net> wrote:
> I haven't followed this thread closely, but is my understanding > correct: > > - You have a FreeBSD NFS server with an export that is a root > filesystem of a Debian 11 install shared by multiple clients Almost. It's not *one* Debian installation, it's many (diskless workstations PXE boot). Each host has it's own root on the NFS. Some stuff is shared, but that's not relevant here. > - You're trying to do an upgrade to Debian 12 running on one of the > clients. Not on one on *all* clients. > - It tries to do a usrmerge but aborts because NFS is not supported > by that script? Correct. Strangely the usrmerge script succeeded on one host. But on all others it throws errors. Either relating to NFS being not supported or because of duplicate files. > If so, have you tried reporting a bug on this yet? No I haven't. As far as I understand it's a known issue and the developer has decided to just have the script fail on NFS. > If you don't get anywhere with that, I don't think you have much > choice except to take away the root directory tree to a Linux host, > chroot into it and complete the merge there, then pack it up again > and bring it back to your NFS server. Which is very far from ideal. I'll try to solve the conflicts manually. If that fails, that's what I have to do, I guess. I didn't expect that level of fiddling with system files for a simple upgrade. But hey, here we are now. > The suggestions about running a VM on the NFS server probably aren't > going to work as you won't be able to take the directory tree out of > use and export it as a block device to the VM. Indeed. > The option of making the usrmerge script work from FreeBSD might not > be too technically challenging but I wouldn't want to do it without > assistance from the Debian developers responsible for the script. I won't do that. I don't speak Perl and will not rewrite the usrmerge script. Marco