Please recommends fuse3 to make sure it wins over fuse (aka fuse2)

Background story

Fuse 3.x was released in 2016. The last release of Fuse 2.x was 2.9.9 in 2019. Since then the branch 2.x seems to be discontinued.

Fuse provides a library and a binary. The libraries are co-installable (binary packages libfuse2 and libfuse3-3). However the packages that provide the command-line tool are not co-installable. It's either fuse2 (package fuse) or fuse3 (package fuse3 which Provides/Breaks/Replaces: fuse). Installing one remove the other.

The transition from fuse2 to fuse3 seems to be a slow process. There's a recent discussion (July 2021) on Ubuntu mailing lists: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2021-July/041530.html. I don't know if the switch happened yet. Beware, in this thread they're talking about Ubuntu main, which has much less packages than Debian.

In Debian, it seems that the transition is not going to happen any time soon:

arno@carbon:~$ apt rdepends libfuse2 | wc -l
105
arno@carbon:~$ apt rdepends libfuse3-3 | wc -l
28

The issue

When a Kali system is installed (via the installer), the version of fuse that is installed depends of the mix of packages that are installed. If any package depends on fuse3 explicitly, then fuse3 wins. That's the case for eg. kali-desktop-xfce and kali-desktop-gnome because these packages depend on gvfs-fuse.

If no package depends on fuse3, then it seems that fuse wins over fuse3. It seems to be the case for an installation of KDE with no tools (cf. https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=7774).

The problem is that open-vm-tools depends on fuse3 explicitly since version 11.3.5, released in January 2022. This package is installed at the very end of the install process, for VMware installations. At this moment, apt runs with --no-remove, meaning that it can only install packages, not remove. If ever fuse is already installed, then it can't install open-vm-tools and fuse3, because that would require to remove fuse...

I opened a bug against the Debian installer to discuss this behavior: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1014925.

Way forward

It seems to me that the best way forward is to recommend fuse3, either in kali-desktop-core or kali-linux-core.

This has two benefits:

• more consistency: we're sure that Kali comes with fuse3, it's not decided by luck
• it fixes the issue with open-vm-tools and the Kali installer

Is fuse required for kali-linux-headless? Yes, via curlftpfs and testdisk. So it seems to me that kali-linux-core is a better choice for the Recommend, if we want to aim for maximum consistency and make sure that all Kali installs come with the same version of fuse.

Moreover, fuse3 has few dependencies, so it shouldn't be a problem to have it in kali-linux-core: