Source: apt-listbugs Followup-For: Bug #1064783 > The command 'apt-listbugs' is installed to /usr/bin and a symbolic link > to it is installed to /usr/sbin .
You are correct, and on a filesystem where those locations are the same it causes unpacking errors. > This layout is not currently supported by Debian, as far as I can tell. It is not yet supported on debian, but using debootstrap instead of debian-installer makes it possible to create such a filesystem layout. This is currently useful for testing how adding /usr/sbin to default user $PATH would break, and how merging /usr/sbin and /usr/bin would break. > Which distributions? Archlinux has had merged bin and sbin for a number of years. Fedora is going in that direction soon and made a nice writeup on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin > I am not aware of any plans in Debian to move in that direction. So far it has been briefly discussed in the -devel channel on IRC and the idea has been received mostly well. There are bigger problems with it, such as different packages having undeclared file conflicts if the sbinmerge happenen, however it is a nice low-hanging fruit to first fix the few packages where the one package unpacks the same file (or symlink) to both bin and sbin. > See the [usrmerge FAQ], which includes, in part: You are correct, this is not about the current usrmerge. It could be called usrmerge2.0 or sbinmerge or some other term. > Could you please elaborate a bit more on why you think this feature of > the apt-listbugs Debian package could be an issue? On a filesystem where bin and sbin are merged, it causes an unpacking error during installation of the package, due to the symlink trying to overwrite the real file, or the real file overwriting the symlink. It is in a way a file conflict - it can be silenced by passing the right flags to the commands, but it is better to fix it properly. > Which other distributions (Debian-derivatives or otherwise) include > apt-listbugs? I don't know of any. > I am a bit hesitant to do so (risking to break random custom scripts), > unless there's a good reason. The idea of merging bin and sbin is exactly to help with random custom scripts, because if bin and sbin are the same directory, then it doesn't matter if only bin or only sbin is in $PATH, or if the executable is called directly using hardcoded /usr/bin/apt-listbugs or /usr/sbin/listbugs, because both ways will then work instead of giving "command not found" errors. However I agree that in the meantime some random script somewhere could break, and so such a change might warrant a NEWS entry.
