Dear Maintainer,
your package installs the filename apt-listbugs to both bin and sbin as opposed to just one of those locations.
This causes a problem on a filesystem layout where bin and sbin are merged into a single real directory, typically by sbin being a symlink to bin.
Such a filesystem layout has become standard on some distributions now, and others are moving onto in their next releases.
Please pick one location and install it only there. /usr/bin is preferred over any other location.
Thank you for maintaining software in debian.
The command 'apt-listbugs' is installed to /usr/bin and a symbolic link
to it is installed to /usr/sbin .
This layout is not currently supported by Debian, as far as I can tell.
Which distributions?
I am not aware of any plans in Debian to move in that direction.
See the [usrmerge FAQ], which includes, in part:
Could you please elaborate a bit more on why you think this feature of
the apt-listbugs Debian package could be an issue?
Which other distributions (Debian-derivatives or otherwise) include apt-listbugs?
I am a bit hesitant to do so (risking to break random custom scripts),
unless there's a good reason.
Source: apt-listbugs
Followup-For: Bug #1064783
The command 'apt-listbugs' is installed to /usr/bin and a symbolic link
to it is installed to /usr/sbin .
You are correct, and on a filesystem where those locations are the same
it causes unpacking errors.
This layout is not currently supported by Debian, as far as I can tell.
It is not yet supported on debian, but using debootstrap instead of debian-installer makes it possible to create such a filesystem layout.
This is currently useful for testing how adding /usr/sbin to default
user $PATH would break, and how merging /usr/sbin and /usr/bin would
break.
Which distributions?
Archlinux has had merged bin and sbin for a number of years. Fedora is
going in that direction soon and made a nice writeup on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin
I am not aware of any plans in Debian to move in that direction.
So far it has been briefly discussed in the -devel channel on IRC and
the idea has been received mostly well. There are bigger problems with
it, such as different packages having undeclared file conflicts if the sbinmerge happenen, however it is a nice low-hanging fruit to first fix
the few packages where the one package unpacks the same file (or
symlink) to both bin and sbin.
See the [usrmerge FAQ], which includes, in part:
You are correct, this is not about the current usrmerge. It could be called usrmerge2.0 or sbinmerge or some other term.
Could you please elaborate a bit more on why you think this feature of
the apt-listbugs Debian package could be an issue?
On a filesystem where bin and sbin are merged, it causes an unpacking
error during installation of the package, due to the symlink trying to overwrite the real file, or the real file overwriting the symlink. It is
in a way a file conflict - it can be silenced by passing the right flags
to the commands, but it is better to fix it properly.
Which other distributions (Debian-derivatives or otherwise) include apt-listbugs?
I don't know of any.
I am a bit hesitant to do so (risking to break random custom scripts), unless there's a good reason.
The idea of merging bin and sbin is exactly to help with random custom scripts, because if bin and sbin are the same directory, then it doesn't matter if only bin or only sbin is in $PATH, or if the executable is
called directly using hardcoded /usr/bin/apt-listbugs or /usr/sbin/listbugs, because both ways will then work instead of giving "command not found" errors.
However I agree that in the meantime some random script somewhere could break, and so such a change might warrant a NEWS entry.
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