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Recently Debian has started to transition away from the "which" command. |
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[1] |
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|
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which is a non-POSIX command which prints out the location of specified |
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executables that are in your path. Unfortunately, there are several |
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versions of the program around which are not compatible with each other. |
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We package the GNU version as sys-apps/which, which is in the system set |
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since 2004. |
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|
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Already in 2007, vapier asked developers to avoid which in ebuilds. [2] |
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The replacement in most circumstances is "type -p" which is a bash |
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builtin command. |
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|
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So, should we join the "which hunt", with the goal of removing |
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sys-apps/which from the system set and from stage1? I think the first |
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step would be to identify which packages use which, and add it as an |
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explicit dependency. (Maybe the tinderbox could help there?) A bug for |
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this [3] has already been filed by mgorny some time ago. |
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|
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Unfortunately, the command pops up in unexpected places, e.g. it appears |
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to be an (indirect) build-time dependency of systemd. [4] |
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|
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Ulrich |
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|
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[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/874049/ |
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[2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/e04d4db72572dd5fec48e87c6b18c525 |
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[3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/646588 |
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[4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/502084 |