Bug#1050001: Practical problems with proposed symlink farming: diversions

[Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org>]

Hi,

a practical thing with usrmerge and legacy layout[1] is the following:
assume you do not want programs to find a specific program via PATH
lookup or even a fully-qualified path.
Then a user can just divert that single program away (or just remove
it, depending on details).

With Jackson's proposed symlink farms this property goes away:
users now have to handle both the copy in / and /usr!

What is worse: both entries could be managed by different means
(shipped by the package, created by maintscript, created by some
external process).

This will probably cause breakage with third party integrations of
management systems like Ansible.

It also seems like a nice property that I don't see any convincing
reason to lose so far; we should try to keep the system simple and not
introduce such complexities without reason (and rigorous reasoning that
it is safe to do so!).

Any thoughts about this?

Ansgar

  [1]: With some exceptions such as some programs have compat symlinks
in the legacy layout or between .../bin and .../sbin.