Hi, Simon McVittie writes: > Should we be more specific than this in what we vote on, to avoid > later having to adjudicate between developers who say that a particular > implementation is or isn't merged-usr? > > Some developers seem to be using "merged /usr" to refer to multiple > concrete layouts: > > 1. an arrangement where all regular files that have traditionally been > in /bin, /sbin, /lib and /lib64 are physically located in /usr, > with symlinks /bin -> usr/bin, /sbin -> usr/sbin, /lib -> usr/lib, > /lib64 -> usr/lib64
Having filed this bug, I only consider this "merged-/usr". Symlink farms (/bin/sh -> /usr/bin/sh) are a different layout and should be given a different name. With that said, I consider the symlink farms also unrealistic for use as an intermediate state in the transition. This was tried by another distribution[1] and it didn't work out; nobody said why Debian wouldn't end up in the same unfortunate situation from which it is even harder to migrate to merged-/usr. >From my point of view the only realistic proposal for migration so far is usrmerge, possibly with modifications. We might also want to be extra careful and use non-merged-/usr on buildds for one more release and only move them to merged-/usr for the release after merged-/usr was made mandatory (so any packages installed as part of the upgrade to the release that makes merged-/usr mandatory are still built on systems with non-merged-/usr for the reasons we do so currently). But I consider these implementations details; it's only useful to discuss them when we know where we are going and most (or hopefully all) detail questions probably don't need the technical committee either. Regards, Ansgar [1]: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Usr_merge
