Debian Bookworm Root on ZFS - caveat unmerged system dirs

[flaki]

From this issue, it looks like at some point I broke the system when I moved it to ZFS root. I believe it was either:

• debootstrap bookworm /mnt did not correctly set up merged system dirs (e.g. symlinking /bin to /usr/bin)
• or I have followed "An alternative to using debootstrap is to copy the entirety of a working system into the new ZFS root." without making sure that symlinks were copied verbatim hence breaking the system in future updates

Not exactly sure which one happened but might be worth further investigating and noting this in the doc.

[mbiebl]

Which version of debootstrap did you use? Is it one that defaults to --merged-usr?

[gmelikov]

Hmm, I've installed it several years ago, it's ok for me

$ ls /bin -dl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 17  2022 /bin -> usr/bin

Maybe we should remove An alternative to using debootstrap is to copy the entirety of a working system into the new ZFS root. part entirely.