Bug#1091995: Call for votes

[Matthew Vernon]

On 25/02/2025 20:59, Matthew Garrett wrote:

I call for votes on the below ballot. The vote is open for 7 days, or
until the outcome is beyond doubt.

In Bug #1091995, the Technical Committe was asked to rule on an issue
that could, under certain circumstances, result in failure of the
base-files package to install or upgrade correctly. Under these
circumstances, systemd will create a symlink from /lib64 to /usr/lib,
which does not match the symlink contained within base-files. base-files
will detect this case in preinst and generate an error, but if it did
not do this then dpkg would instead fail with a less verbose message.

Policy does not currently define ownership of the usrmerge filesystem
aliases, but since trixie base-files has effectively been responsible
for ensuring that these aliases are configured appropriately. This is
therefore a technical disagreement rather than a policy violation.

A) The Technical Committee affirms that base-files should own all
top-level filesystem aliases, and packages that conflict with this must
be patched in Debian to avoid creating any aliases that conflict with
base-files (overrules the systemd maintainer, requires 3:1 majority
vote)

B) The Technical Committee requests that base-files create an empty
/usr/lib64 directory, even on architectures that do not use lib64. If
systemd creates a symlink, this will then match the behaviour of
base-files and avoid the issue (overrules the base-files maintainer,
requires 3:1 majority vote)

C) The Technical Committee requests that base-files preinst check
whether /lib64 is a symlink to /usr/lib and, if so, replace it with a
symlink to /usr/lib64 (overrules the base-files maintainer, requires 3:1
majority vote)

N) None of the above / Further Discussion

I vote: A > N > B = C



Thanks,

Matthew

ISTM that base-files is the right place to "own" top-level aliases, and I've not seen any convincing arguments otherwise.

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