On Sat, 2020-11-21 at 02:01 +0000, Paul Wise wrote: > On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 7:35 PM Simon McVittie wrote: > > > Package-by-package migration touches a large number of packages > > By my count there are 1712 binary packages from X source packages > installing things outside /etc /usr /var
The goal is to have /bin and /usr/bin to have identical contents. If one wishes to achieve that via symlinks for every single binaries, you not only need symlinks in /bin for binaries previously there, but moved to /usr/bin, but also for binaries that already are in /usr/bin. So one would need a new /bin/python3 -> /usr/bin/python3 symlinks in addition to the /bin/bash -> /usr/bin/bash symlink discussed here. This affects many more packages. Starting a 10-year[1] migration for the small part (move bash to /usr/bin, add /bin/bash -> /usr/bin/bash) symlink, then maybe[2] start *another* *multi-year) migration after that, and then getting there isn't a great outlook for me. (At that time migration to merged-/usr for the remaining systems would no longer be a worry either way as presumably only very few installations without merged-/usr would exist anyway and no migration would be needed, i.e., like the i386 -> amd64 cross-upgrade nobody really worries about any more.) Ansgar [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2018/11/msg00354.html [2]: cf. OpenSuSE or suggestions to never do that and instead wait until nobody uses /bin/sh any longer. If you suggest to do package-by-package migrations, please at least argue why Debian wouldn't end in the same in-between state as SuSE.
