On 2020-02-15 18:29 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Sat, 2020-02-15 at 18:31 +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> afaict we are moving to a usrmerge setup, i.e. with /lib just a
>> symlink to /usr/lib. So shouldn't packages start installing stuff to
>> /usr/lib instead of /lib? I would like to do that for libgcrypt, since
>> I would be able to shorten debian/rules by stopping to split stuff
>> between /lib (.so) and /usr/lib (.a).
>
> Since stretch, it's a requirement that any separate /usr is mounted by
> an initramfs before the normal init system is started:
> https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#late-mounting-usr
>
> So although usrmerge is optional, I believe there is no need to install
> libraries under /lib except for the dynamic linkers (which the kernel
> loads using absolute paths).
True, but there seem to be a relatively high number of systems where an
old unowned version of some library is lying around under /lib (possibly
because the dpkg database became corrupted at some point and so dpkg
forgot about the file; see the dpkg bug #949395), and when that library
starts be installed under /usr/lib, this will trigger symbol lookup
errors and the like. See #896019 and #948318 for examples.
Cheers,
Sven
