Giving that on Ubuntu this was done (and in other distros), and there isn't any issue ( I just noticed that I have a merged /usr for a long time), the dpkg maintainer it's being a jerk.
Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
81–90 of 310 posts
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am of the opinion that BDFL style governance is best in software. In the real world the problem is a bit more hairy, but if you have an issue with a tyrant in open source, you can just fork the project. A BDFL solves the bureaucracy problem (they mandate, everybody implements) and the big ego problem (the biggest ego is at the top by definition). Also BDFL can have vision, something a committee will never have. In…
What does Jobs have to do with software.
A lot of the software at Apple was shaped specifically by his likes, dislikes and needs. The dictator doesn't need to be a developer.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't compare you with a nazi, but you should understand that minority's can take over a country, that's what the nazis did but also the communists in romanov-russia...china is more complicated. It's something completely different, but maybe "nazi" is a red flag for you in comments...because not comfy. EDIT: And more actual, the Taliban's in Afghanistan, an absolute minority but the one with weapons, training, conn…
If you define majority as 50%+1, and minority as 50%-1, almost all democracies in the world have the minority in the power (unless they get 100% turn out rate with all votes contributing to parliamentary seats). Winning 60% of votes with a turn out of 70% voters is only 42% of the population.
>However, despite waging a campaign of terror against their opponents, the Nazis only tallied 43.9 percent of the vote on their own, well short of a majority to govern alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_elec...
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#84Democracy 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…
Everything that works well is structured like a monarchy. Maybe the west shouldn't be trying so hard to export democracy?
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#85Earlier 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…
It doesn't seem too difficult to support; what are the edge cases?
Who owns a file in a path that includes a 'well known symlink dir'?
So maintain a list of well known symlink dirs. When checking a file path against the database, the normalization step should check if the known symlink dir is any point of the path; if it is the redirect should be resolved to the well known target instead.
E.G. owns('/bin/bash') ... the path mutates to '/usr/bin/bash' because the location '/bin/' is already known to really be '/usr/bin/'.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#86Democracy 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
Did you invent this? Because it's freaking brilliant!
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the tiranny of the majority had flaws (but to me is mostly unavoidable due to the natural economies of scale it grants). In a different context, this is a source of frustration for me as a (partially) blind person advocating accessibility for blind people. The world is designed around the assumption, correct for most people, that people have the high-bandwidth, low-latency sense of sight. And that does lead to the…
First of all I think Eugenics would/will quickly lead to something akin to runaway selection: people will make increasingly absurd decisions mainly driven by status markers / perceptual drift and the human race will breed itself into some mad corner. So I don't believe Eugenics is ever going to do what even its most ardent supporters imagine. Second of all the human race does not have some over-arching goals we need…
> Second of all the human race does not have some over-arching goals we need to meet like a business. It is or should be like a club run for the benefit of the members: let's create good conditions for people. We can tolerate a bit of complexity and diversity.
Individuals and groups (including businesses) do have goals though, and it seems natural that some of them feel that they're being thwarted in their pursuit of those goals by expectations that they accommodate every little minority (including the one to which I belong). The backlash against legislation requiring accessibility, for example, is real, as seen in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30726471
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't compare you with a nazi, but you should understand that minority's can take over a country, that's what the nazis did but also the communists in romanov-russia...china is more complicated. It's something completely different, but maybe "nazi" is a red flag for you in comments...because not comfy. EDIT: And more actual, the Taliban's in Afghanistan, an absolute minority but the one with weapons, training, conn…
If you define majority as 50%+1, and minority as 50%-1, almost all democracies in the world have the minority in the power (unless they get 100% turn out rate with all votes contributing to parliamentary seats). Winning 60% of votes with a turn out of 70% voters is only 42% of the population.
Nah, people staying home on polling day doesn't stop them from being part of the majority opinion. If an option gets 60% of the vote, and there are no shenanigans going on, then that option is almost certainly the choice of the majority.
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#89Just in case anyone is wondering why we had (or used to have) /bin and /sbin directories as well as /usr/bin /usr/sbin here is my understanding of it.
It is because on old Unix systems there frequently wasn't enough space to store /usr on the root disk. Therefore /usr was a separate disk which might not be available during boot. This meant that you needed to put all the binaries you needed for boot in /bin and /sbin because /usr/bin and /usr/sbin might not be mounted yet.
This no longer makes sense in the days of large disks which fit /usr just fine and initrds which can mount all the disks before kicking off the things which might need those binaries. In fact I think the initrd has taken the place of /bin and /sbin on a modern system containing copies of all the binaries needed to mount the disks (like mount and fsck).
Re: Debian still having trouble with merged /usr
#90No post body was provided.