[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1099706: dbus: needlessly depends on base-files or usr-is-merged

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 06 Mar 2025 at 22:58:57 +0000, cacin at allfreemail.net wrote:
> Severity: important

What major effect do you believe this dependency has on the usability
of the dbus package, given that base-files is already Essential?

The intention of this dependency is to make sure that during upgrades
from bookworm to trixie or partial upgrades from trixie to trixie,
base-files (or usr-is-merged) is upgraded before dbus, so that it will
be base-files (or usr-is-merged) that is responsible for presenting
messages about how a non-merged /usr is no longer supported.

The validity of the current dependency was agreed with the coordinators
of the merged-/usr transition in #1072756 and #1085407.

If the alternative dependency on usr-is-merged is a practical problem for
whatever reason, now that the required version of base-files has been
around for a while we could remove that, leaving only base-files.

For avoidance of doubt, I do not consider the presence of a small
transitional package on upgraded systems to be a Severity: important bug.
dbus' changelog alone is larger than the usr-is-merged package.

> base-files is an essential package and debian trixie only functions with
> a /usr-merged filesystem layout. It is guaranteed that a debian trixie
> system is /usr-merged.

dbus had a particularly bad failure mode if the version that has moved
its systemd unit to /usr is installed on an unsupported system that is not
/usr-merged (see #1054650).

Unfortunately, some Debian users create unsupported situations, and then
demand that I resolve those situations for them. I am not willing to carry
the support burden of responding to reports like #1054650
("Severity: critical"), even if those reports represent user error.

    smcv