Hi Matthew, On Sun, 2023-08-27 at 11:30 +0100, Matthew Vernon wrote: > Any such consideration must be mindful of the fact that the majority of > Debian installs are now /usr-merged, which means that the complexity of > unwinding such installs has to be a heavy factor in thinking about > alternative approaches.
Yes, I think there are many technical challenges required before Debian would be in a position to adopt the proposed Jackson filesystem layout. If Debian would choose to adopt it at all (an open question). Besides conversion, there is also the telemetry service that seems to be required to safely move to the proposed layout (AFAIK no alternative to this has been proposed yet). I'm not sure if there is already any work done on the path by the proposers? I'm also still missing an overview what the Jackson layout's advantages over the existing filesystem layout (merged-/usr) or the 2000's layout is (split-/usr). As far as I can tell it combines the disadvantages of both with much additional work required to get to it; I don't really see any advantage so far (besides "our tools can't handle anything else", but in practice it seems to work fine, and of course avoiding stuff associated with a certain company which I understand is a goal in itself for some people)... I would appreciate a list of technical and ideological reasons why switching to the Jackson layout is important for Debian. Ansgar
