[HN Gopher] Debian pauses /usr merge file moves
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       Debian pauses /usr merge file moves
        
       Author : gslin
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2023-05-17 21:41 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lwn.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
        
       | price wrote:
       | A comment there on LWN, from a Debian developer, adds useful
       | context:
       | 
       | > [T]his 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.
       | 
       | In particular, the thing that this announcement pauses is only a
       | shuffling of internal metadata. For users, /usr will already look
       | merged either way.
       | 
       | The other bit of context is that this "pause" comes as Debian
       | approaches its next major release, and they expect to unpause it
       | shortly after that.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-17 23:00 UTC)