Helmut Grohne <hel...@subdivi.de> writes: > What is supported is a bit subjective I fear. At this point, neither > merged-/usr nor unmerged-/usr is supported well. Both are broken in one > way or another and nobody steps up to fix the mess. In particular, the > dpkg maintainer does not support merged-/usr in dpkg (which is his > constitutional right as long as he does not block reasonable patches), > but neither does anyone else.
I think this accidentally confuses the related states of "unsupported" and "buggy." We know that merged-/usr is buggy, in that one can construct a set of package operations that leave the system in an invalid state. We have a project disagreement over how serious those bugs are. No one is stepping forward to fix those bugs, which is indeed quite unfortunate. I personally strongly disagree with the belief that simply because Ubuntu hasn't seen many instances of this class of bugs while using a package set where people have not moved files between packages and out of /lib and /bin very much if at all, it is acceptable to leave dpkg in that buggy state. However, I think this is similar to many other disagreements over the severity of bugs, particularly ones that are hard to fix. It doesn't really imply that this configuration is *unsupported*, which would mean that if someone had a system in that state and reported a problem we would say that we couldn't help them because their system is not in a supported configuration. This is not the case; merged-/usr is supported in that sense. Guillem may not be willing to support the user in that case but other people most certainly would. That said, I personally am disappointed that the folks who have been pushing merged-/usr forward are willing to leave dpkg in a known-buggy state without attempting to patch it to fix the remaining issues. I realize that there are various obstacles in successfully doing that, not all of which are technical, but I want to believe that Debian is the sort of project that will do the hard work (both technical and social) to fix edge cases and maintain a high level of consistency and correctness. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>