Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 11, 2022 7:29 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
In reply to: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr by rra
Parent article: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

After /usrmerge, dpkg's understanding is "stuff is in /usr/* instead of /*" (assuming that the database reader is patched to adjust merged paths on the fly). Which is factually correct.

IMHO these oh-so-dangerous edge cases simply do not occur on actual systems. Files from held packages get moved to /usr by the usr-merge transition, they are where dpkg thinks they are (see above) and are reachable under both old and new paths, due to various symlinks.

Debian still having trouble with merged /usr

Posted Apr 11, 2022 17:15 UTC (Mon) by rra (subscriber, #99804) [Link]

> assuming that the database reader is patched to adjust merged paths on the fly

You're assuming exactly the thing that we're discussing, which is not done, and which the dpkg maintainer does not want to do. Yes, if the problem is solved, there isn't much of a problem.