We've reached an important milestone in modernizing a core component in postmarketOS and Alpine Linux, we're ready to merge /usr! This is also an important stepping stone on the long road to supporting systemd and later immutable image-based installs. In one month (~2025-08-27), if no major issues are found, we will merge an update in edge that will cause existing installations to auto-migrate to a merged /usr filesystem layout.
In the meantime, to help us gain even more confidence, we would greatly appreciate help from folks who are able and willing to help us test this out and report issues they encounter.
WARNING: Only do that if you are running edge and you know how to recover your system in case of failure!
The steps for testing this out are:
# Make sure you're up-to-date first
# You should have all the latest versions or the script and other packages
# at the time of the update
$ doas apk upgrade -aU
$ doas apk add mrtest
$ mrtest add 6389
# Follow the mrtest prompts. When asked for what to upgrade, select 'u'
# to upgrade packages you already have installed
If this fails, or you run into any issues, it would be helpful to collect some additional information when reporting the issue to us:
$ apk list --installed > packages.txt
$ busybox tar c -f merge-usr.tar /var/log/apk.log packages.txt /etc/apk/world
The merge-usr.tar file this produces can be attached to a bug report. Report bugs in !6389.
pmbootstrap master creates merged /usr installations by default since today (!2637). If you experience any bugs there, let us know as well (in the postmarketos-devel chat or pmbootstrap issue tracker).