Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 2:48 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr by sobkas
Parent article: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

The solution is for core parts of the distro to refrain from telling users to make drastic, irreversible changes to their systems, when the distro's development community as a whole has not agreed to support the resulting state.

But that's too sensible, so they will obviously never make it a policy.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 6:21 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (6 responses)

>irreversible changes

Why would this be irreversible?

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 8:12 UTC (Thu) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (2 responses)

That script also builds and installs a new package on-the-fly designed to stop usrmerge from being installed again, hence stopping the project from being able to implement an automated transition (like Ubuntu did), and it's marked as Protected: yes which IIRC means manual user intervention is needed to remove it

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 9:03 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

>That script also builds and installs a new package on-the-fly designed to stop usrmerge from being installed again

That step is optional and disabled by default.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 9:44 UTC (Thu) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

For now - and by default it still prompts the user when the script is ran, with a misleading 'Generate and install a regression prevention package' message

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 7, 2022 17:46 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm assuming that apt remove doesn't undo it. If it did, then the person asking "how do I fix this?" would presumably have already tried that.

I consider a package installation "irreversible" if reversing it is more complicated than apt remove. Yes, technically, you can probably reverse any change made to your system unless data was actually deleted, but in practice, you're just going to back up your data and reinstall or reimage, because that's faster and safer than tediously picking through the filesystem and manually rearranging everything.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 8, 2022 15:03 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

dpkg-fsys-usrunmess is not a package installation.

The package installed *by* dpkg-fsys-usrunmess is purely optional and disabled by default. It has nothing to do with the conversion of the filesystem hierarchy.

Saying that dpkg-fsys-usrunmess is irreversible is just plain wrong.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 8, 2022 17:16 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> dpkg-fsys-usrunmess is not a package installation.

Well, that just makes things even worse in my book, because now you don't even have apt remove as a thing to try, and you *have* to undo it by hand.

> Saying that dpkg-fsys-usrunmess is irreversible is just plain wrong.

I already explained what I meant by "irreversible" once; I will not repeat myself.