On Fri, Nov 19, 2021, at 3:23 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote: > On Thu, Nov 18, 2021, at 8:06 PM, Luca Boccassi wrote: >>> On Thu, 2021-11-18 at 16:23 -0500, Zack Weinberg wrote: >>> Luca Bocassi wrote: >>> ... >>>> nobody has actually seen [the file disappearance bug] >>>> happen, to the best of my knowledge. >>> >>> I already explained why that doesn't prove the bug is a non-issue. >>> To the contrary; it means there is an enormous installed base of >>> systems where the bug is latent, waiting to cause problems under >>> conditions which we can reasonably expect to occur shortly after >>> the release of bookworm. >> >> Why would the release of bookworm make any difference? > > Up until the release of bookworm, all Debian packages must be > constructed on the assumption that they _might_ be unpacked on a > system that has not yet been converted to merged /usr. Particularly > for priority-required packages, this means that no one will be moving > files from /bin, /lib, etc to /usr in the bookworm cycle. > > Post-bookworm, if nothing changes, that assumption will no longer be > in force, and people who maintain packages that install files into / > will want to simplify their packaging by installing everything in /usr > instead. If they also want to change the binary packages that ships > some of those files at any point in the same release cycle -- kaboom.
After having caught up on the thread, I see that the conditions required to trigger the bug are somewhat more complicated, but the point remains: particularly for the packages where a lost file could render the system unbootable, changes that would trigger the bug have been deferred until post-bookworm, *and* we can reasonably expect the maintainers of those packages to *want* to make changes with a high risk of triggering the bug. I imagine the coreutils maintainers are looking forward to getting rid of their list of programs that go in /bin, and the extra debian/rules logic to go with it, for instance (https://sources.debian.org/src/coreutils/8.32-4.1/debian/rules/#L16). zw
