>>>>> "Timo" == Timo Röhling <roehl...@debian.org> writes: Timo> However, Guillem also seems to think that dpkg can manage file Timo> symlinks in a real directory better than an directory symlinks Timo> in /, which is why he proposed symlink farms in the first Timo> place. Assuming dpkg implements the proposed Timo> canonicalization, is there a scenario where the aliased dirs Timo> break, but would not break with a symlink farm?
Quite possibly. However, I haven't been examining that part of the design space because the symlink farms approach misses key features that are important to some usrmerge use cases. In particular, if you're sharing a /usr between containers or similar, and moving toward the empty /etc at boot ostree style approach, symlink farms don't work and base level symlinks do work. That may not matter so much for Debian (at least in some people's minds) but being compatible with the rest of the world has enough value in this instance that I consider the issue moot. Symlink farms are a different thing, and that's not what we're trying to get here.