El 18/7/23 a las 0:06, sr2hm5+5ii138igarkk0@cs.email escribió:
Package: base-files
Version: 12.4
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
debian 13 (trixie) only supports usrmerged systems, therefore /bin will always
be a symlink to /usr/bin and /sbin will always be a symlink to /usr/sbin
Please remove /bin and /sbin from $PATH defined in /etc/profile because they
are no longer necessary and only increase the length of $PATH.
This changed has not caused any issues on my systems since debian 10 (buster).
Hello. I trust that you have tested the change in your machine and "everything
works" for you,
but in addition to this "run-time behaviour" that you tested, this change might
also
affect deeply the way we build packages.
As of today, autobuilders have not adopted usr-merge yet, so we definitely
should
not change the PATH at this point.
But even if we could shorten the PATH some day, I wonder what's the point at
all.
I have the feeling that some people believe that the usr-merge is about moving
everything from /bin to /usr/bin and *deprecating* /bin. My reading of this:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/
tells me that the usr-merge is about making /bin and /usr/bin to be
"equivalent and the same", which is not the same as deprecating /bin or /sbin.
As far as I know, the reason Debian is moving files from /bin to /usr/bin
is an implementation detail and it's related to the way dpkg handles the
usr-merge (dpkg "follows" blindly the symlinks, which makes the current
usr-merge that we did so far to be some kind of "hack").
So, the day we could technically shorten the PATH if we wanted to,
there would be the same reason to remove /bin than to remove /usr/bin,
as both of them are equivalent and the same.
To summarize, this change would be harmful at this point, it's potentially
disruptive in the medium term, and probably unnecessary at all in the
long run anyway.
Granted, we could save a few microseconds of CPU time, but to be sure that we
don't break anything, somebody should check that none of the source packages
in unstable builds differently when built in an environment with a different
PATH.
This is probably a task that the reproducible-builds people could do if they
wanted,
as they have the infrastructure for that. But until that happens, we might
better keep the PATH untouched to avoid breaking things.
TLDR: This is currently a "wontfix", but I have never been a big fan of the tag.
In the long term I would prefer to close this bug and, optionally, document
the issue in the base-files FAQ if required.
[ PS. I believe you are a regular contributor in debian-user. If you have not
done yet,
you might want to subscribe to -devel to follow the development of the
usr-merge.
Things are really more complex than they appear to be ].
Thanks.
