Package: usrmerge
Version: 6
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system
Dear Maintainer,
I installed usrmerge on a system to try it out, and ended up with system
that could not be rebooted. I'll try to outline the status as best I
recall in the hopes that you can recreate the issue.
* What led up to the situation?
I installed usrmerge, and got the following during configuration:
--------------------
Setting up usrmerge (6) ...
WARNING: renaming /bin/ (for the purpose of replacing it with a symlink
to /usr/bin/) has failed with the EBUSY error.
This is probably caused by a systemd service started with the
ProtectSystem option. Before running again this program you will need to
stop the relevant daemon(s) or reboot the system.
Do not install or update other Debian packages until the program
has been run successfully.
WARNING: renaming /sbin/ (for the purpose of replacing it with a symlink
to /usr/sbin/) has failed with the EBUSY error.
This is probably caused by a systemd service started with the
ProtectSystem option. Before running again this program you will need to
stop the relevant daemon(s) or reboot the system.
Do not install or update other Debian packages until the program
has been run successfully.
WARNING: renaming /lib/ (for the purpose of replacing it with a symlink
to /usr/lib/) has failed with the EBUSY error.
This is probably caused by a systemd service started with the
ProtectSystem option. Before running again this program you will need to
stop the relevant daemon(s) or reboot the system.
Do not install or update other Debian packages until the program
has been run successfully.
WARNING: renaming /lib64/ (for the purpose of replacing it with a
symlink
to /usr/lib64/) has failed with the EBUSY error.
This is probably caused by a systemd service started with the
ProtectSystem option. Before running again this program you will need to
stop the relevant daemon(s) or reboot the system.
Do not install or update other Debian packages until the program
has been run successfully.
dpkg: error processing package usrmerge (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit
status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
usrmerge
--------------------
I could not figure out which processes/daemons in particular were
causing the errors.
At this point, I examined the disk layout, and noticed that basically
everything* in /{bin,sbin,lib} had been moved to /usr/{bin,sbin,lib}, and
replaced with symlinks in /{bin,sbin,lib}, but /{bin,sbin,lib} still
existed as real directories (not symlinks).
(* - I noticed two exceptions in /lib, both of which were directories,
but unfortunately I can't remember exactly what they were, and the
history is beyond the top of my terminal buffer. My best guess is that
they were systemd and x86_64-linux-gnu, but again, I'm not certain of
that.)
Since I couldn't figure out which daemon was causing the problem, I
rebooted the system as suggested in the usrmerge configure error
messages. It didn't come back up: it failed to start with an error that
/sbin/init was not found on the disk. Oddly, however, I could run ls
/sbin/init which *did* show an existing symlink and target.
I tried rebooting with init=/usr/sbin/init, but that also did not work.
Eventually I got the system to boot using init=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd
after which a dpkg --configure usrmerge completed the merge (turning
/{bin,sbin/lib} into symlinks). After this, rebooting without
specifying init= was successful.
Please let me know if there's any other information I can provide to
keep this from happening to others.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental'), (1, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.3.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages usrmerge depends on:
ii libfile-find-rule-perl 0.34-1
usrmerge recommends no packages.
usrmerge suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
-- debsums errors found:
debsums: can't check usrmerge file /usr/share/doc/usrmerge/changelog.gz (Wide
character in subroutine entry)
