The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess
in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, which
is in keeping with the practice of most other distributions at this point; it effectively
eliminates the top-level /bin, /sbin, and /lib
directories in order to move their contents to the corresponding locations
under /usr. But ever since we first covered the feature introduction for
Debian more than six years ago it has a been a recurring series of
headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply
prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.