On Sun, 28 Nov 2021 09:48:22 +0100 Niels Thykier <ni...@thykier.net> wrote:
> This is a consequence of the currently incomplete "/usr-merge" > transition, where /bin has been merged into /usr/bin without dpkg's back. > > As such, dpkg knows those paths only by their "officially declared" > paths in /bin. It is obviously confusing to you as a user because you > then have to "know" whether to search for /usr/bin/P or /bin/P. > > As a work around you can use a wild card search, such as: > > dpkg -S '*/bin/ls' > I suppose this means I don't actually understand how dpkg works at all. The files are there in /usr/bin, and SOMETHING, presumably an installer run by dpkg the most recent time coreutils was updated, installed them. But dpkg does not know which installer was running at the time? Does it rely on some information separate from keeping track of the actual files written while an installer is running, to know which installer was responsible for writing the files? That's very unexpected at least to me. It seems like manually maintaining the lists would be a lot more work than coding the automatic tracking I had assumed was happening. I'd be interested in understanding the design constraints that make it preferable. Not that it makes much difference on the ground right now. The news relevant to this is, it's on your radar already as an issue with this migration/merge situation, and I'm not bringing up anything that wouldn't eventually get fixed otherwise. So I suppose all there is to say is "known issue" and "workaround available" and close this when you get to it in the due course of the migration work. I hope various aspects of this don't cause you too many more headaches. Honestly I don't have much opinion on the /bin and /usr/bin merger; the pros and cons seem balanced on a knife edge to me. It seems like an objectively good impulse to reduce complexity, but it also seems like a hell of a lot of work, pain, and confusion to go through right now for what will be, in any particular future year, only a very minor benefit. On the third hand there won't come a time in the future when it's easier or less painful than right now, so the choice is existential; rather than "when", we face "whether at all" because the pro and con arguments are unlikely to change. Bear
