Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 6, 2022 15:13 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
In reply to: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr by ianmcc
Parent article: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

True, and that it hasn't happened shows that users generally don't really care. My guess is that they'll care about "dpkg -S" not finding /bin/bash (when it's really /usr/bin/bash with /bin → /usr/bin) just as much: not really.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 6, 2022 19:02 UTC (Wed) by sobkas (subscriber, #40809) [Link] (1 responses)

I once wrote a tool to unbreak my system after a long habit of using make install on /usr and or /.
It checked if hash of a file was identical to one in dpkg database and if not it would reinstall package.
It also deleted files that were not part of any package. Surprisingly it didn't brake my system and allowed Gnome to start again.
It was so long time ago, but then I just started to package changes that I needed instead of using make install.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 3:56 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

That sounds like a reinvention of the cruft and cruft-ng packages. IIRC they are able to explain more files than just the ones in the dpkg database, such as the *.pyc files generated at install time from python3-* package post-install scripts.