Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

Another conflict: in Debian Trixie (current stable release), when you run `systemctl status …` you’re given the rather scary warnings:

    State: degraded
    …
    Tainted: unmerged-bin

This is because Debian has a separate /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. There are no plans to either back off this warning by the systemd maintainers, or to patch it out by the Debian maintainers, and also no plans to merge /usr/sbin and /usr/bin.

So we’re left with the absurd situation that Debian users are being told the default clean install is ‘degraded’ and ‘tainted’ by its main init system!

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1085370

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/35438

If this is the case, I am surprised no one has patched this anti-feature out of the source. Both sides made that suggestion directly in the bug reports you linked. I expect it should be positively trivial to implement a patch, but someone must step up and do the work.

systemd upstream says "distros can patch it out if they want", the debian package maintainer doesn't want to carry a patch. "Someone needs to write a patch" is not the problem here.

Oops. I misread Luca’s reply as willingness to accept a patch, but he said to submit one upstream - where they explicitly don’t want it. So, yeah, deadlock.

Has anyone pushed on this issue? If a patch exists and upstream explicitly says it belongs in the distro, then I expect an explanation from the maintainer(s) would need to be presented to detail exactly why it’s either unsuitable/unmaintainable or left better as-is.

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