On Tue, 17 Aug 2021 at 08:08:15 -0600, Sam Hartman wrote: > In order to build packages that work on a non-usrmerge system, you need > a build chroot that is not usrmerge.
Well. That's not 100% true: it's more accurate to say that when *some* source packages are built in a merged-/usr chroot, the resulting binary packages don't work correctly on a non-merged-/usr system. Most source packages are fine either way. Such packages are already violating a Policy "should", because they're not building reproducibly (and the reproducible-builds infra tests this for testing and unstable). Ansgar did a survey of this when we were discussing one of the Technical Committee bugs, and reported that around 80 packages had a bug of this class at the time, which had apparently dropped to 29 by the time the TC resolution was voted on. If we want to make buildd chroots merged-/usr any time soon, then I think we need to say this class of bugs is RC for bookworm. Re-reading TC resolution #914897, it's possible that these bugs are *already* RC - at least, that's one possible interpretation of what we resolved. However, if we keep the buildd chroots unmerged-/usr in order to avoid these bugs becoming significant, then, yes, we get the consequences you described. This class of bugs applies equally to anything that makes an executable available at both /bin/foo and /usr/bin/foo, so even if people want to disregard the two Technical Committee resolutions on the subject of merged-/usr and look for consensus around symlink farms in the root filesystem instead, we'll probably still need to make sure bugs of this class get fixed. smcv