[systemd-devel] Support for unmerged-usr systems will be REMOVED in the second half of 2023

[Richard Purdie]

On Tue, 2023-06-13 at 15:31 +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jun 2023 at 15:15, Richard Purdie
> <richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, 2023-06-13 at 11:29 +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> > > On Tue, 20 Sept 2022 at 20:18, Luca Boccassi <bluca at debian.org> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Hello,
> > > > 
> > > > Following this thread started back in April:
> > > > 
> > > > https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2022-April/047673.html
> > > > 
> > > > As far as we understand there are no distributions running or
> > > > optionally supporting systemd that have not either completed, or at
> > > > least started, the transition to merged-usr systems.
> > > > 
> > > > So, we are planning to drop support for unmerged-usr systems in the
> > > > first release that will happen in the second half of next year, I.E.:
> > > > any time starting from July 2023 (while we tend to release somewhat
> > > > regularly we do not have strict dates and deadlines, so right now it's
> > > > not possible to tell the exact version, but it will be of course
> > > > communicated once it becomes clear).
> > > 
> > > As previously announced, this is being prepared now and will be part of v254:
> > > 
> > > https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/27999
> > 
> > I'd note that nobody did resolve the issues for Yocto Project yet so
> > our CI will break if we try and upgrade :(.
> 
> Those issues are purely internal to Yocto's custom CI and completely
> unrelated to systemd, as they manifest without systemd being even
> enabled. The 'usrmerge' distro feature was added six years ago, in
> 2017, by Yocto developers:
> 
> https://git.yoctoproject.org/poky/commit/?id=178e983cf745fe32b199e0cbfe9777270124b186
> 
> If even Yocto developers cannot manage to fix internal CI issues
> created by internal features added by Yocto developers in 6 years,
> there's hardly anything outsiders could possibly do, I'm afraid.

The issue is that Yocto Project supports a variety of configurations
and systemd has decided to drop support for some of them.

Nobody has done the work to migrate the configuration combinations
being dropped in Yocto Project.

Distro features are optional in Yocto Project, we don't force people to
use them. There are plenty of people with products shipping in the wild
which do not use the "usrmerge" feature. Our own test matrix hasn't
been adjusted to force usrmerge for systemd, nor is the documentation
or migration information present for that change.

This is not an issue caused by our "internal features" and to claim
that is farcical.

Richard