Dear Lorenz!

Thanks! That is exactly the confirmation I have been asking for.

Lorenz - 27.11.23, 02:24:43 CET:
> Il giorno dom 26 nov 2023 alle ore 11:49 Martin Steigerwald <
>
> martin@???> ha scritto:
> > Hi!
> >

> > I just upgrade to runit 2.1.2-54+usrmerge on Devuan Ceres and it gave
> > me> 
> > the following output:
> >    === WARNING ===

> >
> > unmerged system detected via /sbin
> > warning: unmerged systems will fail to boot very soon
> > due to /[s]bin/ directories becoming empty!! <----THIS IS THE
> > PROBLEM!!!
> > please merge this system as soon as possible
> > for details refer to DEP17 (M2) documentation
> > https://subdivi.de/~helmut/dep17.html
> >
> >
> >
> > Do I need to merge usr on my Devuan Ceres systems in order to prevent
> > boot them failing *very soon*. Or is that hint only aimed at Debian
> > users?helps a lot as I really felt quite intimidated by the amount of
text in that document.
> Yes you need to perform the merge on Ceres.

Thanks. Will do.

> If you are using Stable (Daedalus) you can still run unmerged but you
> need to remember to perform the merge *before* you ugrade to the next
> stable (Excalibur). If you are tracking testing or unstable you need to
> perform the merge as soon as possible.

Okay, that is something that definitely needs to be in Excalibur release
notes. Or the merge should just be done at beginning of installation. I
bet Debian Trixie will do the merge anyway on upgrade on systems where it
has not been already done. It is probably just Devuan Ceres / Debian Sid
users who need to do it manually.

But let's see.

> Stive Litt wrote :
> > I'm pretty sure if worst came to worst you could install runit by the
> > old ./configure;make;make-install route, and it will work just fine
> > with or without the merge, forever.
>
> right now, it really won't work
>
> Svante Signell wrote :
> > Hopefully your system will continue to work fine without usrmerge.
>
> Sadly, no
>
> Let me try to better explain this:
> Mitigation M2 in
> https://subdivi.de/~helmut/dep17.html
> means that *every deb package* is about to ship files directly in
> /usr/bin instead of /bin, or directly in /usr/lib instead of /lib and
> so on.. An unmerged system will end up *without* /bin/sh,
> /sbin/init, /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
> (on amd64) just to make few relevant examples.

Thanks for clarification. This helps me a lot to make a sense of this huge
document.

Yes, and it already starts. Just accepted for Debian Sid:

udisks2 (2.10.1-4) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Stop moving files from /usr/sbin to /sbin.
     With merged-/usr being mandatory, this is no longer necessary.

While udisks2 may not be mandatory for boot, I think, binaries from other
packages will be.

Thus will install usrmerge and merge the systems *today*. Better be safe
than sorry.

> This move is *mandatory* for every Debian package, so until some
> derivative starts to support unmerged layout by forking 500/1000
> packages (or by some other means) the unmerged layout will be broken.

I suspected this much.

> Hope this helps to better understand the situation,

Very much so. The runit package could have a sentence to confirm the
necessity of doing the merge for Devuan, but that would probably need a
fork of Runit package for Devuan, thus understand in case you don't want
to do it.

> P.S.
> Note that runit is only acting as a messenger here: as runit maintainer
> supporting unmerged system is out of scope (and not feasible since for
> example I don't have control over /bin/sh) but failing to boot is a
> problem for the package.

I do not blame you, quite the contrary.

While I dislike Debian developers forcing this on me, I think in case they
really move the files and do the merge in a cleaner way that makes
something like dpkg -S $(which bash) work again than what they did as they
started with it it will be okay. I do not need to mount /usr separately.

I am grateful that I can still use another init system instead of having
the ton of policy forced upon me that is implemented in systemd.

> So I decided to print the message with the hope to be able to reach as
> many users as possible before the fallout.

Thanks for that. I'd probably would have run into that situation without
being aware without the warning!

Thanks for answering in such a detailed way.

Best,
--
Martin