On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 09:38:39AM -0300, Daniel Ruoso wrote: > Simple. <sarcasm> Sure, that's precisely what I'd call being properly supported in Debian. </sarcasm>
In particular, from the replies to my question the picture I get is
that everybody is using ad hoc solutions to implement what some people
are pretending to be properly supported by Debian. I found it not
defendable, maybe it's just me, maybe it's just bad marketing.
Of the two one:
- We decide that mounting /usr remotely is a Debian goal.
If we do so, the mechanisms to make it work should not be as ad hoc
as this thread as hinted. We should provide a package explicitly
made to make this workflow tenable and point our users to it.
- We decide that if you want to mount /usr remotely you are on your
own.
If we do so, we should stop using "mount /usr remotely" as an
argument for keeping /usr as a single filesystem.
A few side notes:
* various people replying to my request mentioned that in such a
setup, you are not expected to upgrade "too often" the machine
exporting /usr
* everybody overlooked the subtle theoretical problem that our
maintainer scripts can potentially do *everything* on the file
system and *everywhere*, and that they are written in a Turing
complete language (shell script). This means that you cannot, in the
general case discover what they have touched. As a consequence you
can not simply rely on the dpkg database to know what you have to
propagate.
The trick of fiddling the dpkg database on the client machine and
then run "dpkg --configure -a" there is indeed nice. But again,
requesting our users to do that, potentially messing up with the
dpkg database, is IMO not something we can call being properly
supported in Debian. If it is supposed to work that way, we have to
provide higher level tools that do that for our users.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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