[Discuss] Debian 12 vs. WSL 1

[grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu (grg)]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2023 at 10:28:46AM -0400, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
> the bloat I was thinking of was all the scripts with workarounds
> to handle variations, not the few extra links on every system. A link feels
> kinda equivalent to one line of code, so if more scripts lose a line than
> links are added, it's all good.

good point!  so the question becomes whether there are more lines of
./configure sussing out paths in software packages, or more installed systems.


On Sat, Jun 24, 2023 at 11:37:45AM -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> shell and runtime linker only care about the first ones they find. For

even if only one is used at a time, the system still has two paths to the
resource (which I'd argue is twice as many as a clean design ought to have...)

> This isn't bloat. It's redundancy.

but unfortunately there's only one copy - usrmerge has made sure you've lost
any data redundancy you might have had.  so all you're left with is the bloat.

> The accepted UsrMerge makes this possible: just delete the /bin, /lib,
> /lib64 and /sbin symbolic links.

I thought the "merged-usr-via-aliased-dirs" solution which won the usrmerge
battle explicitly calls for the /bin, /lib, etc. symlinks to exist?

> Your machines will be unusable after doing this, but you can very easily

(in case it wasn't completely obvious, the reason I said that this option
would be "a *lot* of work" is that before doing this you'd prepend /usr on
every path everywhere that doesn't have it, so that the machines would
still work once you did it.  sorry, thought that was obvious.)

--grg