[tor-bugs] #34115 [Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team]: review the impact of usrmerge

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#34115: review the impact of usrmerge
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     Reporter:  anarcat                          |      Owner:  anarcat
         Type:  defect                           |     Status:  assigned
     Priority:  High                             |  Milestone:
    Component:  Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin   |    Version:
  Team                                           |
     Severity:  Major                            |   Keywords:
Actual Points:                                   |  Parent ID:
       Points:                                   |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                                   |
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 Debian buster shipped with a "merged `/usr`", which means that `/bin`,
 `/lib` and `/sbin` are now symlinks to their counterparts in `/usr`. There
 are concerns that this behavior is buggy and triggers problems in all
 sorts of places. In particular, the `dpkg` maintainers are quite unhappy
 about the change and do not support it as a configuration:

 https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/MergedUsr

 ... which is disturbing, considering the `dpkg` is such a core component
 of a Debian system.

 That wiki page provides a hackish script to "migrate away" from usrmerge
 but no one, as far as I know, has done that in production. It definitely
 looks nasty.

 We should consider whether:

  1. this is a real problem
  2. which machines have usrmerge
  3. whether new machines should have it
  4. whether we need to fix old machines

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/34115>
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