Hi,

On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 4:36 PM Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:
>
> what happens if during usrmerge you run out of space on /usr ?
> does usrmerge back out gracefully, leaving the system intact?

I don't know for sure, maybe it has some sefaguards. If you can read
perl, usrmerge is a perl script

>
> is there a good way of estimating how much space will be needed

roughly, the sum of the following
# du -hs /bin
# du -hs /sbin
# du -hs /lib
# du -hs /lib64
what it does, I think, is to copy everything in the above dirs into
their /usr counterparts,
so /bin into /usr/bin and so on, and then it replaces /bin, /sbin and
so on with symlinks to
their user counterparts. It's not an atomic move, if you are wondering.
you might need twice the above space because it may copy stuff in
/bin /sbin/ /lib /lib64 to a backup before removing it (not sure).
It's not a large amount of space, usually.

> so i can repartition first if necessary?

this question rings a bell: I'm not sure that's your case but I think
the only thing that is not supported
in a usrmerged system is to have a /usr partition separate from root.
Kernel mounts root and then exec into /sbin/init, but /sbin is a
dangling symlink because /usr is not yet mounted
so the kernel panics.
I think a workaround could be to make the initrd mount /usr before it
exec into /sbin/init; another one could be to
install busybox-static somewhere (/boot?) and have the initrd exec
into a busybox script that mounts /usr (and then
exec into /sbin/init).
Not sure the above works (I don't have a separate /usr and I don't use
initrd) but maybe it's not even your problem
and I'm overthinking..

Best,
Lorenzo



>
> i guess i have the same question about the subseqent upgrade
> from daedalus to excalibur.
>
> --hendrik
>
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 11:04:08AM -0400, R A Montante, Ph.D. via Dng wrote:
> > > Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2026 03:23:14 +0200
> > > From: Arnt Karlsen<arnt@???>
> > >
> > > > https://pclinuxos.com/ The boomer distribution
> > > >
> > > > both are systemd free.
> > > ..then they may be worthy of advice on how to try appear
> > > viable by fixing their site withhttps://validator.w3.org/ or HTML-Tidy
> > > and ditch ClueLessFlare telling us which darn
> > > web browser to use.
> >
> > "Hear, hear!" to this. At least I don't get told to upgrade to Internet
> > Explorer 4 any longer...
> >
> > Circling back to the subject line, can someone explain, or give me a pointer
> > to an explanation, why the "usermerge" issue is such a problem?
> >
> > I get the rationale for the original "one of my 5-Megabyte disk packs has
> > failed" division, and lumping everything into /usr seems like a minor bit of
> > housekeeping simplification (alternatively, "/usr/bin" could just as well be
> > a symlink back to "/bin", why not? )
> >
> > What breaks? How? Is it just that some people like to make /bin and /lib
> > be read-only?
> >
> > TIA, -bob,mon.
> >

> > --
> > "'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice"
> >     - Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

>
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