Debian pauses its /usr merge — again

Yes, this is a misleading writeup of a Debian-internal announcement. One specific action that is mostly internal to Debian, which some developers wanted to push ahead with after the bookworm release, has been paused.

On a merged-/usr system (which will include all Debian 12 and Debian 13 systems, both new installations and upgrades), both /bin/cat and /usr/bin/cat exist, but dpkg is only aware of one of those paths (/bin/cat in this case); in dpkg jargon, the other is said to be an alias. The specific action that should not proceed until further notice is: swapping the path that dpkg considers to be canonical, for example from /bin/cat to /usr/bin/cat.