Hi, a practical thing with usrmerge and legacy layout[1] is the following: assume you do not want programs to find a specific program via PATH lookup or even a fully-qualified path. Then a user can just divert that single program away (or just remove it, depending on details).
With Jackson's proposed symlink farms this property goes away: users now have to handle both the copy in / and /usr! What is worse: both entries could be managed by different means (shipped by the package, created by maintscript, created by some external process). This will probably cause breakage with third party integrations of management systems like Ansible. It also seems like a nice property that I don't see any convincing reason to lose so far; we should try to keep the system simple and not introduce such complexities without reason (and rigorous reasoning that it is safe to do so!). Any thoughts about this? Ansgar [1]: With some exceptions such as some programs have compat symlinks in the legacy layout or between .../bin and .../sbin.
