[Discuss] Debian 12 vs. WSL 1

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 12:47:31PM -0400, grg wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 07:18:17PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 07:07:19PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > > No. A symlink solves that problem if it's a concern in your
> > > environment--it never has been in any of mine,
> > 
> > FWIW, I'd venture a guess that it HAD been at one point, but someone
> > solved it in the obvious way before I came along, and it never
> > intruded upon my peace. =8^)
> 
> I think the usrmerge proponents claim that it's working for you not because
> it was some trivial/"obvious" tweak by one person at one point beyond your
> event horizon, but rather because developers/package maintainers exert
> *constant* effort to keep it working for you.

So to be clear, I was talking about a time long before the merge was a
thing, so no, it was not due to the effort of ANY developers or
maintainers at all.  Some on this list are aware that I was a
professional sysadmin from approximately 1994-2007, and during that
time this has never posed a problem for me in any of the environments
I managed, some of which were quite heterogeneous.  By the time Sun
adopted the merge I was no longer managing any Sun hardware.

> derek, I'm curious whether usrmerge has "intruded upon your peace" -- what
> problems have you run into with it, what extra work has it caused you?
> or has the change been pretty seamless for you as they intended?

Yes--I did notice when I updated to a version of Ubuntu that defaulted
to this, though I can't recall why.  It was admittedly a minor
inconvenience, but it was an inconvenience nonetheless--enough of one
that I did notice, not enough of one to remember the details.

However, note that I'm coming at this from the perspective of having
lived through a multitude of past changes within the Linux/OSS
community which have...  e.g. mostly pointless changes to the head and
tail command (which were at least in part permanently reverted, BTW),
changes to the way X windows initialization worked, etc., etc., ad
nauseum, disregarding lessons learned in the past (probably for lack
of knowledge of them) in the name of some marginal or nonexistent
benefit that arguably makes the design more consistent (or whatever)
but causes a bunch of pain for people, and most especially for "power
users"--myself included.  If you ever do anything out of the ordinary
in terms of customizing your environment, these kinds of issues are
much more likely to aggravate you.  Once (probably close to 20 years
ago now) I even filed a support ticket for xterm on Fedora, and was
told xterm was deprecated and unsupported.  Seriously?

[I want to mention systemd, but I exclude it because it did actually
solve some important problems... It's not *quite* in the same class,
though it certainly was a huge change that was basically rammed down
everyone's throats and did cause a lot of pain.]

I bump into this kind of problem--which I will classify as change for
its own sake introducing new bugs and problems--pretty much every time
I update my Linux installs, and have for literally decaes now.  Most
of the issues are small, a rare few are...not.  But in total they add
up to a whole lot of wasted time over mostly pointless changes.  Don't
get me wrong--there's tons and tons of change, and most of it is
great, or at least... innocuous.

I don't know yet whether it's going to affect my WSL installations,
which I use, and therefore update, only infrequently--but probably at
least some of them.

> /bin and /usr/bin?), I would really have liked the usrmerge proponents to
> have written a much less crappy usrmerge script and made it a whole lot
> better at usrmerging.

This is exactly the type of expense I was talking about when I said
"change is expensive."  It's virtually impossible to automate
non-trivial migrations 100% effectively.  Bear in mind, this didn't
just affect YOU, it probably affected a lot of people, multiplying the
cost immesurably.

I'm very familiar with the class of problems the merge is meant to
solve, and Rich's arguments neither told me anything I didn't already
know nor convince me that this does anything sufficiently worthwhile
to justify the change.  Obviously YMMV.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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