Subject: System does not boot due to dependency to /usr

From: Klaus Ethgen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2017 16:56:41 +0100

Package: lvm2
Version: 2.02.175-1
Severity: critical

Debian-Bug: #881057
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Klaus Ethgen                                       http://www.ethgen.ch/
pub  4096R/4E20AF1C 2011-05-16            Klaus Ethgen <[email-masked]>
Fingerprint: 85D4 CA42 952C 949B 1753  62B3 79D0 B06F 4E20 AF1C

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From: Mark Hindley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2023 10:21:18 +0000

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 - moreinfo

Klaus,

Now I know more about how your system is setup (from other bug reports you have
submitted), I am going to change the severity of this report to wishlist.

That doesn't mean I don't understand your concerns, or think that they are not
important. However, booting Debian without initramfs to mount /usr has not been
officially supported for a number of releases (Jessie or even Wheezy, I
think). I regret this and wish it still was a possibility. But that decision has
been made and I see no realistic or practical way of Devuan going against it.

I know that will be disappointing to you. If you have practical ways you think
we can achieve it, by all means say.

With thanks and best wishes

Mark

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From: Klaus Ethgen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2023 11:48:47 +0100

Hi Mark,

> been made and I see no realistic or practical way of Devuan going against it.

Yea, the decision was made for no needs just as Pöttering does not
understand what it is for.

They dropped all old systems like mine out of support.

But Linux is not that short living than windows. This makes it
absolutely unbelievable. Moreover, they put some extra effort into
explicitly breaking former working packages.

> we can achieve it, by all means say.

As I have many experiences now, I can think of a way to do that. It
would mean to build a devuan fork of pcre2 source package with minimal
changes (as I did in
ftp://ftp.ethgen.ch/pub/debian/pool/unofficial/p/pcre2). All other
packages listed below could be made with a empty package only holding
diverts of the libraries. The reason for the different handling is that
if you divert pcre2 in between, it would break dpkg itself. So that is a
manual step or (as I did) with a patched package.

Here are the packages I identified, that are needed to be in /:
  - libargon2-1
  - libpopt0
  - libkmod2
  - liblz4-1
  - libzstd1
  - libjson-c3
  - libjson-c4
  - libjson-c5
  - libssl1.1
  - libssl-dev
  - libssl3
  - libaio1
  - libacl1
  - libattr1
  - libuuid1
  - libblkid1
  - libelogind0
  - libmount1
  - libedit2
  - libedit-dev
  - libbsd0
  - libmd0

But as I said, non of them needs to be changed if you do the diverting
one.

The dev packages are due they hold the unversioned .so symlink. And that
is needed in some rare situations.

Regards
   Klaus
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