Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> writes: > Thus, either usrmerge Essential or not included in Buster -- no middle > way.
I think I agree with this. My impression is that most of the problems with usrmerge are because we're trying to support a halfway position that Red Hat did not try to support, where some systems are merged and some aren't. This creates a ton of complicated edge cases and inconsistencies, and now we're looking at making invasive changes to package build systems to try to fix those edge cases. This feels like a vast waste of developer time and resources that could be put to better purposes. If we just force-merge every system on upgrade, none of those inconsistencies matter, and I do believe we could successfully complete that process (with some bumps, of course). But this halfway slow migration is death by a thousand cuts. I think there are some arguments to be made for just force-merging and moving on, but they're mostly "tidiness" arguments (letting everyone recycle the brain cells they're currently using to keep track of whether something is in /bin or /usr/bin and try to make decisions about this, getting rid of all the compatibility symlinks, permanently eliminating all minor bugs from omitting /bin or /sbin from PATH, and so forth). Those are real benefits that I don't think we should underestimate, but I'm not sure they're strong enough benefits to create a bunch of hard feelings and frustration and anger inside the project. They're also mostly benefits for packagers; there aren't a ton of benefits for users here. If we're *not* going to commit to force-merging all systems, I think we should just stop, or at least slow way down, because there are a *lot* of edge cases and it's going to require a lot of work to go through them. I'm very dubious of the viability of any strategy that requires people override the paths to binaries in their debian/rules file to undo Autoconf auto-probing, for example. It feels to me like we should decide as a project whether we're going to do the same thing Red Hat did and just do the merge and be done with it, or whether we're going to do a much slower migration by some more robust strategy of (for example) moving each binary out of /bin manually, but either way, the current strategy does not seem viable to me. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>