Michael Stone <mst...@debian.org> writes: > On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 09:59:24AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> 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). > I think that's likely to be the most painful upgrade since a.out. We'd > need one heck of a lot of testing that needs to have already started > unless we want to push back buster. This seems like too high of a level of pessimism given that the usrmerge package already implements this sort of force-merge and some people have it installed and don't seem to be running into a bunch of bugs. The last round of problems was on systems without it installed, because packages generated that way weren't backward-compatible, not with the forward direction of forcing the merge. That said, if we do want to go down this path, getting as many people as possible to install usrmerge now and make sure it doesn't break anything (or report bugs if it does) seems like a good idea. (Just don't build Debian packages for upload on the resulting system; use a build chroot instead.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>