Bug#1041072: trixie: Explicitly flag that /usr-merge changes will break skip-upgrades

On Sat, 15 Jul 2023 12:34:31 +0100 Justin B Rye <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Matthew Vernon wrote:
> > We don't support skip-upgrades, but in practice they can often be made
> > to work by an experienced administrator.
> >
> > For trixie, though, packages are going to be allowed to assume
> > merged-/usr, and the ongoing work to resolve the outstanding problems
> > around merged-/usr and dpkg is going to concentrate on making sure all
> > bookworm-trixie upgrades will work. But changes that could result in
> > file loss on a bullseye-trixie skip-upgrade will not be considered
> > bugs, so it would be good to particularly emphasise in the trixie
> > release notes that skip-upgrades to it are not supported, and that in
> > all circumstances administrators must upgrade to bookworm first.
>
> This issue shouldn't be a major risk as long as admins know to
> install usrmerge as step one.  (If they're upgrading direct from
> stretch then I suppose step zero is "find a copy of usrmerge".)
>
> Maybe a new warning-note thing at the top of section 4.2?  Of course
> if they're doing skip-upgrades because they don't have time to read
> all those separate Release Notes then they're probably doomed...
> --
> JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
> sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
>
>

It may make sense to cover
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057121

and
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1041072

together, as they are both related to usrmerge