Haven't used debian or debian based systems for many years. They do too much "automagic" things behind your back and thus tend to brick themselves, especially during major updates. Not really sure how they got so popular. The packaging ecosystem is also kinda mess.
Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
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Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#12Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. Debian is the very example of it. Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to su…
> Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. The problem is not in democracy itself as a concept. In both the open-source world and in society itself, the problems arise only when the demos (the population) either grow disinterested in democracy or is small in numbers. As for "tyr…
> As for "tyranny of the minority" - I hope to never see that phrase again. Protections for minorities in democracies exist for a very good reason.
There is plenty of evidence for the theory proposed by Taleb[0] on this one, he wrote:
"It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences."
[0] The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour That is specifically not what happened, and the article is quite clear about it. The Technical Committee voted unanimously for merged usr: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=978636#178 The problem is that dpkg, an essential component of Debian, has specific issues with symlinks: https://wiki.debian.org/Team…
I'm quoting the article: "Debian took a more incremental approach, in part because it strives not to make wholesale changes to users' systems like those required by a flag-day upgrade to a merged /usr. In 2016, the ability to voluntarily switch to that scheme was added, then some attempts were made for newer versions of the distribution to be installed with a merged /usr by default. [...] The location of some files w…
> The fact that the committee took a decision that the core package manager can't support is baffling to me.
Why? Presumably the committee would be thereby deciding to drive development of the package manager toward whatever is required to support the high-level goal.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#14Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. Debian is the very example of it. Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to su…
> tyranny of the minority
this is a trendy thing too, very often minorities who felt ignored, are now pushing to get more because of the tiranny of the majority had flaws (but to me is mostly unavoidable due to the natural economies of scale it grants).
I don't know how one can design a social system where you balance both in the right way.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#15Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. Debian is the very example of it. Case in point: other distros forced the usr migration and very few problems were had. Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour so Debian decided to su…
> Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. The problem is not in democracy itself as a concept. In both the open-source world and in society itself, the problems arise only when the demos (the population) either grow disinterested in democracy or is small in numbers. As for "tyr…
No post body was provided.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#16From the original proposal from 2012 that is linked to in the article: > The primary commercial Unix implementation is nowadays Oracle Solaris. [...] By making the same change in Linux we minimize the difference towards the primary Unix implementation, thus easing portability from Solaris. I wonder what he means by "primary"? I'm reasonably sure than in 2012 OS X was used on more machines than Oracle Solaris.
They're talking about things that distro maintainers care about, namely servers.
They are primarily not concerned with your workstation.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#17I'm surprised that they are pushing to remove /bin and keep /usr/bin. Why not the other way round? Let's keep our binaries out of /usr! (as a first step to remove /usr altogether, since it has a confusing name).
I long for a day where PATH=/bin is all we need.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Debian put the idea through a committee, of course a minority wanted to keep the old behaviour That is specifically not what happened, and the article is quite clear about it. The Technical Committee voted unanimously for merged usr: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=978636#178 The problem is that dpkg, an essential component of Debian, has specific issues with symlinks: https://wiki.debian.org/Team…
I'm quoting the article: "Debian took a more incremental approach, in part because it strives not to make wholesale changes to users' systems like those required by a flag-day upgrade to a merged /usr. In 2016, the ability to voluntarily switch to that scheme was added, then some attempts were made for newer versions of the distribution to be installed with a merged /usr by default. [...] The location of some files w…
The committee took a decision that the package manager /doesn't/ support.
If I've learned one thing, it's that there's very little that software can't be made to do. Whether it should is an entirely valid question, and hopefully figured out before assessing the "could" aspect.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#19Sigh ... gobolinux solved this quite elegantly over 20 years ago, and to this day most folks don't quite grok how simple and elegant their solution was.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Democracy is pretty decent, but comes with some big flaws: tyranny of the minority, enormous amounts of back-and-forth to get anything done, big egos at any level can stop progress. The problem is not in democracy itself as a concept. In both the open-source world and in society itself, the problems arise only when the demos (the population) either grow disinterested in democracy or is small in numbers. As for "tyr…
Quoted post unavailable.
Comments section is only two levels deep and we have already arrived at Godwin's law.