Hi,
Not quite sure where in the relevant threads to put this concern, but.
On 17/07/2022 14:21, Luca Boccassi wrote:
On Sun, 2022-07-17 at 11:34 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jul 2022 at 00:56:14 +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
The patch from user uau that the dpkg maintainer rejected in the
past
has been submitted to the existing bug [2] for completeness (with
permission from the author).
If I remember correctly, Julian Andres Klode was developing a version
of this patch that replaced the hard-coding of the /usr merge with a
more general way to declare "directory A is an alias for directory B"
and have it stored in the dpkg database, so that dpkg has the
mechanism
and some Essential package like init-system-helpers or base-files
could
have the policy, in the hope that this would be more acceptable to
the
dpkg maintainer. Is that code available?
I asked Julian a week ago or so on IRC if he had worked on that patch
at all, and the answer was no. Besides, I think [0] and everything else
make it very evident at this point that the form and function of the
patch attached to the dpkg bug are not really the problem. There are
more fundamental issues of project management and organization at play,
and thus we really do not want those issues to be in the way of the
goal of fully moving to merged-usr.
[putting footnotes in your .sig means they go missing when I reply]
While it's understandable, I am saddened and a bit worried by the "it's
too much hassle to fix dpkg's usr-merge support, let's not bother"
message I seem to be getting from these threads.
I like to think that Debian strives for technical excellence, not "this
class of bugs is very infrequent, so it's not worth the pain to fix". I
get that getting patches accepted into dpkg can be challenging (and that
is, in an of itself a problem), but it worries me that we seem to be
collectively deciding that this is an acceptable status quo.
This is very much a personal view, not an expression of anything
approximating TC policy.
Regards,
Matthew
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=994388#132 (the
warning that was briefly in dpkg re merged systems)
