On Thu, Nov 18, 2021, at 8:06 PM, Luca Boccassi wrote: >> On Thu, 2021-11-18 at 16:23 -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote: >> Luca Bocassi wrote: >> ... >>> nobody has actually seen [the file disappearance bug] >>> happen, to the best of my knowledge. >> >> I already explained why that doesn't prove the bug is a non-issue. >> To the contrary; it means there is an enormous installed base of >> systems where the bug is latent, waiting to cause problems under >> conditions which we can reasonably expect to occur shortly after >> the release of bookworm. > > Why would the release of bookworm make any difference?
Up until the release of bookworm, all Debian packages must be constructed on the assumption that they _might_ be unpacked on a system that has not yet been converted to merged /usr. Particularly for priority-required packages, this means that no one will be moving files from /bin, /lib, etc to /usr in the bookworm cycle. Post-bookworm, if nothing changes, that assumption will no longer be in force, and people who maintain packages that install files into / will want to simplify their packaging by installing everything in /usr instead. If they also want to change the binary packages that ships some of those files at any point in the same release cycle -- kaboom. zw