Lorenz via Dng <dng@???> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2026 at 1:47 PM Svante Signell via Dng
> <dng@???> wrote:
>
>> I'm also stuck at Daedalus for now. However, on GNU/Hurd, I'm not using
>> usrmerge, even when following unstable. The solution is to (revert)
>> patch base-files, patch sysvinit and introducing a few soft links to
>> some few packages.
>>
>> That could also be a future solution for Devuan. More investigations
>> are needed, however.
>>
>
>> See above. Maybe we should try to create a few soft links for selected
>> packages in addition to patching base-files and sysvinit (et al)
>
> Just an idea (and I'm not going to do the work) but do you know
> /usr/bin/dh_movetousr
> from debhelper package? the addon is designed to move files at build time
> to /usr (the opposite of what you want) but I think it's an example that shows
> that you can have a "dh_unmovetousr" or "dh_unmerge" that moves an hardcoded
> lists of files form /usr back into their original path (you also
> probably need to symlink-farm
> into /usr).

You also have to make sure that whatever your init system runs before
/usr is mounted does *not* execute anything that lives there. As in

#!/usr/bin/...

in shell scripts or

exec("/usr/bin/...", ....);

for C and whatever else might be used, e.g. /usr/sbin/*, /usr/lib/*,
/usr/share/*, etc.

Needless to say, if other programming languages are used by your init
system, their equivalents of C's exec() need covering too.

That said, I haven't bothered to to check what that might entail.

FWIW, with /usr *not* on its own partition and recommended packages
installed by default (for a change)

  % df -h / /usr
  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/nvme0n1p2   28G  6.7G   20G  26% /
  /dev/nvme0n1p2   28G  6.7G   20G  26% /
  % apt-config dump | grep -i recommends
  APT::Install-Recommends "1";

but I'm a bit of a minimalist with only(?) 1308 packages installed :-)

Know this doesn't really help, but thought I'd mention it anyway.
--
Olaf Meeuwissen