On 6/27/26 11:41 AM, Peter Duffy wrote:
> I'm coming into this late in the game, and I'm sure I'm not
> understanding all the parameters at the moment: I need to do more
> reading and research. A couple of things occurred to me:
>
> - does the usrmerge process keep a log? If so, would it be possible to
> do a "usrdemerge"? If not, maybe it might be a good idea to introduce
> logging into the package? (If the maintainer would allow it, of course
> . . . ) Obviously, just putting the files back into their original
> locations isn't going to be sufficient to reverse the usrmerge process
> - all the things which depend on the new locations would also need to
> be fixed.
>
> - probably worth reproducing the problem with the usrmerge upgrade and
> doing a detailed diagnosis. (By now, someone may have already started
> on that.)
>
> On Sat, 2026-06-20 at 07:55 -0500, o1bigtenor via Dng wrote:
>> Greetings
>>
>> I use a separate system to do initial updates on before I do some on
>> my main system.
>> A habit developed quite some time ago on advice from a mentor.
>>
>> Did the usrmerge upgrade and then had an unusable system.
>> Stopped there.
>>
>> Have seen comments which seem to suggest that this usrmerge idea is
>> not really a
>> good idea.
>>
>> So do I reinstall Daedalus on my testing system and not bother
>> upgrading to Excalibur
>> waiting for perhaps an option where I don't need to use usrmerge or
>> do
>> I do an install of
>> Excalibur removing Daedalus (which is no borked).
>>
>> Advice is sought - - - please?
>>
>> TIA

The usrmerge is not that difficult to do manually. I had to do that for
my Pi cluster booting from NFS and could easily make backups on the
server side in case of error. Eventually not long after that I changed
my cluster to boot from iscsi instead of nfs because docker changed
their default driver storage support to overlay2. Overlay2 will not work
on a nfs mounted storage.

As I mentioned earlier on this list if you do not mind to have a
unsupported system you can uninstall usrmerge and usr-is-merged
packages, set pin priority to -1 and continue the upgrade. In the long
run it will not be sustainable though and I choose rather a other battle
then usrmerge.