As far as I can find there are issues, namely that installing a package with dpkg can leave the system in a bad state. If I understand it correctly dpkg normally prevents by checking the paths it modifies, which ends up non trivial if the paths are aliased.
> the dpkg maintainer it's being a jerk.
He is required to accept working patches, priority by the committee seems to be the removal of warnings about the broken support instead of actually fixing it.
The thing is that no one wants to interact with a maintainer hostile to the very idea of your patch. Sure, they may be "required" to accept it, but it's not going to be a fun process for anyone involved.
Part of Boccassi's concern with their patch is that it might not be merged at all due to what they perceive as "moving goalposts" and "excuses". I think that's not entirely an unreasonable concern, and no one likes to work on patches that will never get merged.
I don't know what the path forward for Debian would be here. Things seem ... difficult. Getting some of the social tension solved and having people "kiss and make up" would probably be a good start, but that can only work if people are willing.
> The thing is that no one wants to interact with a maintainer hostile to the very idea
His hostility seems to be based on actual reasons if it is true that other systems that performed the unification basically throw out any guarantees made by dpkg. Providing a patch that fixes that would get rid of those reasons.
> Part of Boccassi's concern with their patch is that it might not be merged at all due to what they perceive as "moving goalposts" and "excuses".
Bocassi is also the guy who claimed the first incomplete patch was rejected without further comment, which going by the article wasn't the case. So his opinion of the maintainer is at best misinformed, at worst intentionally deceptive.
Also going by the article a merge can be forced by the committee. So this seems to be a non issue.
There seem to me some conflicting accounts and perspectives. Boccassi took the "broken by design" snipe in reply to his patch as "this is going to get rejected", which I don't find completely unreasonable. There were also some other more technical comments from other people, which other people took as "this could get merged, if it gets addressed", which is not unreasonable either.
Yes, the CTTE can force a merge, but that's a pretty uncomfortable situation for everyone – at the very least it's going to be an uphill battle. I wouldn't just dismiss it as a "non-issue".
I spent a good time reading up on some of the mailing list threads this afternoon as I thought it's an interesting social problem, but with a long simmering conflict that's been going on for years it's hard to really get to the bottom of things. No one here seems especially constructive, but it's hard to really get to the bottom of the full context of all of this. I can definitely understand people's lack of motivation in writing fully polished patches if the dpkg maintainer is constantly railing that it's all "broken by design" though.
> the dpkg maintainer it's being a jerk.
He is required to accept working patches, priority by the committee seems to be the removal of warnings about the broken support instead of actually fixing it.