On Wed 01 Jan 2020 at 18:48:00 (+0100), Sven Hartge wrote: > David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > > > But this does follow the (snipped) comment 'the "/usr Merge" that > > might hit a fan someday'. For those *not* preparing packages for > > Debian and/or other distributions, can anyone express a downside > > to usr-merge, ie for typical "user/consumers". > > For me the biggest downside was that "dpkg -S", "dlocate" and "apt-file > search" and the web-equivalent stopped working reliably, because the > final path in the filesystem is no longer the same as it is in the > package.
Yes, I notice that the bug (134758) dates back 18 years and originally involved the old /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/bin/X11 symlink. It complicates using dpkg -S to search for one specific path (in a script, say), but for interactive use it's enough to remove the leading / to avoid misses caused by usr-merge. (There are already misses caused by alternatives, and files created at installation time.) apt-file search by default uses --substring-match, but I expect someone to post how you turn that option off, which I've never done. > It also broke some internal CI/CD where the wrong paths were used when > the CD chroot was built with usr-merge active but the deployment target > was not usr-merged. The same has happened for the Debian buildds. I thought I was avoiding that by excluding package-builders. Or is this something else entirely? > And it also broke some 3rd party vendor packages which had the same > directory in /lib and /usr/lib, but with different contents. What do these vendors do on conventional (non-Debian/non-linux) systems that have ceased to have any /lib long ago? On Thu 02 Jan 2020 at 06:04:03 (-0500), Steve Litt wrote that usr-merge causes problems with systems that are initramfs-free (and /usr is a mounted filesystem). I don't think Debian has supported such systems in a long while, so you're really on your own with creating and booting those. Cheers, David.
