Re: TC decision on ownership of top-level filesystem aliases - #1091995

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:39:06 +0800

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.ctte,gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hello ctte,

On Tue 04 Mar 2025 at 11:46am GMT, Matthew Vernon wrote:

> 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.

Just to note that the most recent release of Policy sort-of defines
ownership of this, though it is not as explicit as the TC decision:

    Packages must not install files to paths whose first component is a
    name directly under the file system root and which is a symbolic
    link to a directory of the same name under "/usr".  ...  The
    base-files package is an exception, for it installs aliasing
    symbolic links from "/bin" to "/usr/bin", "/lib" to "/usr/lib", et
    cetera.

-- 
Sean Whitton

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