Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Mike Gilbert <floppym@g.o>
To: Gentoo Dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt?
Date: Fri, 13 May 2022 16:52:00
Message-Id: CAJ0EP42ZTJsvH4Tmy+97eUqcwj_90yz8ZbJxW-ocNqA7jXCJsw@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt? by Mike Gilbert
1 On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 11:44 AM Mike Gilbert <floppym@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 3:11 AM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
4 > >
5 > > Recently Debian has started to transition away from the "which" command.
6 > > [1]
7 > >
8 > > which is a non-POSIX command which prints out the location of specified
9 > > executables that are in your path. Unfortunately, there are several
10 > > versions of the program around which are not compatible with each other.
11 > > We package the GNU version as sys-apps/which, which is in the system set
12 > > since 2004.
13 > >
14 > > Already in 2007, vapier asked developers to avoid which in ebuilds. [2]
15 > > The replacement in most circumstances is "type -p" which is a bash
16 > > builtin command.
17 > >
18 > > So, should we join the "which hunt", with the goal of removing
19 > > sys-apps/which from the system set and from stage1? I think the first
20 > > step would be to identify which packages use which, and add it as an
21 > > explicit dependency. (Maybe the tinderbox could help there?) A bug for
22 > > this [3] has already been filed by mgorny some time ago.
23 > >
24 > > Unfortunately, the command pops up in unexpected places, e.g. it appears
25 > > to be an (indirect) build-time dependency of systemd. [4]
26 >
27 > "which" is a built-in command in bash, but not in dash. For most
28 > users, /bin/sh points at bash and I don't expect to see much breakage
29 > when /usr/bin/which is removed. The bug reports will come from people
30 > who like pain and run their systems with /bin/sh pointed at dash.
31
32 Oops, turns out I tested with zsh, not bash. Disregard the above.