Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

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It should also be noted that, while this change is Linux-specific, it does not directly break software which also targets BSD or nix-like OSs.

Files that were previously in /usr/bin or in /bin can now be found in EITHER of these locations, since one symlinks the other. So no previous expectation was really broken.

Only software built on merged systems fails to run on unðmerged systems. This should not really happen, since the usr merge was a one way trip, not a flag that you're supposed to turn on and off. You'd also never build dynamically linked binaries for BSD on Linux, so that should not be an issue.

But, for some reason, Debian chose to make this merge something that individual systems could turn on and off, which is a terrible idea for part of the base system. It's like letting users pick if they way `/bin` or `/binaries`. Having such heterogenous setups in regards to something so basic and foundational is asking for breakage.

> Files that were previously in /usr/bin or in /bin can now be found in EITHER of these locations, since one symlinks the other. So no previous expectation was really broken.

I don't know, I just hit breakage the other day. I have /usr/bin before /usr in my path (which is the default on Ubuntu at least); I have muscle memory to use dpkg -S `which $foo` to figure out which package a binary is, but that doesn't work if dpkg thinks the binary is in /bin (e.g. ping), since it'll ask dpkg who installed /usr/bin/ping, which is nobody.

It is small fiddly things like this all over people's packaging and personal scripts that break.

This is a _very_ clear P.O.V.:

Who installed '/foo/bar/baz' when '/foo' is a symlink to '/usr/bin'?

I'm 100% in favor of the DPKG maintainer's perspective of "do ugly symlink farms" and then "reap what you sow" (ie: if you don't like there being a symlink there, then fix the offending package).

Debian didn't "choose" anything. It's just a bunch of people who wanted merged-/usr to become reality created a tool to convert a system until a project-wide decision is made. The decision has been made ultimately, but the dpkg maintainer blocks it from being implemented.

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