Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt?

[Philip Webb]

220513 Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> Recently Debian has started to transition away from the "which" command.
> [1]

Do we take Debian as a role model ?

> 'which' is a non-POSIX command which prints out the location of specified
> executables that are in your path. Unfortunately, there are several
> versions of the program around which are not compatible with each other.
> We package the GNU version as sys-apps/which,
> which is in the system set since 2004.

If there is a GNU version, that would seem to be somewhat "official".
Also, it's been around a long time.

> Already in 2007, vapier asked developers to avoid which in ebuilds. [2]

There well mb good reasons for the devs to do that,
but users may have different needs or preferences.

> The replacement in most circumstances is "type -p"
> which is a bash builtin command.

It does appear to do the same job, but it's more difficult to remember.
Yes, anyone could make 'which' an alias for 'type -p'.

> So, should we join the "which hunt", with the goal
> of removing sys-apps/which from the system set and from stage1 ?
> The first step would be to identify which packages use 'which'
> and add it as an explicit dependency.
> Maybe the tinderbox could help there ?
> A bug for this [3] has already been filed by mgorny some time ago.
> Unfortunately, the command pops up in unexpected places,
> e.g. it appears to be an (indirect) build-time dependency of systemd. [4]
> [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/874049/
> [2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/e04d4db72572dd5fec48e87c6b18c525
> [3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/646588
> [4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/502084

Those are a user's reactions.  I trust the devs to do something sensible.

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