Hi Johannes,
On Thu, Oct 08, 2026 at 03:40:29PM +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues
wrote:
> do you have some reference text of what is wrong with update-binfmts and why
> it
> is no longer useful? I do not see any deprecation notice in the description of
> the binfmt-support binary package in unstable. The update-binfmts program
> still
> exists in unstable and still has the --display option.
There are two competing ways to configure binfmts. Let me call them
binfmt-support and systemd. (Guess which one existed earlier.)
binfmt-support uses /usr/{share,lib}/binfmts and expects extension-less
files in a multiline notation.
systemd uses /usr/lib/binfmt.d and expects .conf files containing a
single colon-separated line.
Please try apt-file search -x '[be]/binfmt[.s]' to get an idea of the
adoption of either formats.
Ideally, we only have one such format and despite binfmt-support being
the older one, I think we're having a difficult time converting the
systemd people. Also qemu does not provide the support files for
binfmt-support anymore. The only package in sid that does not yet
support the systemd way is jarwrapper.
So I'd suggest deleting binfmt-support from Debian. Not because it would
be buggy. Not because it came later (it came first). But because systemd
is too-big-to-fail and the competing standards evidently pose confusion.
I'm not going to push for this though.
Helmut
