Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt?
Date: Fri, 13 May 2022 07:11:51
Message-Id: u35hduct9@gentoo.org
1 Recently Debian has started to transition away from the "which" command.
2 [1]
3
4 which is a non-POSIX command which prints out the location of specified
5 executables that are in your path. Unfortunately, there are several
6 versions of the program around which are not compatible with each other.
7 We package the GNU version as sys-apps/which, which is in the system set
8 since 2004.
9
10 Already in 2007, vapier asked developers to avoid which in ebuilds. [2]
11 The replacement in most circumstances is "type -p" which is a bash
12 builtin command.
13
14 So, should we join the "which hunt", with the goal of removing
15 sys-apps/which from the system set and from stage1? I think the first
16 step would be to identify which packages use which, and add it as an
17 explicit dependency. (Maybe the tinderbox could help there?) A bug for
18 this [3] has already been filed by mgorny some time ago.
19
20 Unfortunately, the command pops up in unexpected places, e.g. it appears
21 to be an (indirect) build-time dependency of systemd. [4]
22
23 Ulrich
24
25 [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/874049/
26 [2] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/e04d4db72572dd5fec48e87c6b18c525
27 [3] https://bugs.gentoo.org/646588
28 [4] https://bugs.gentoo.org/502084

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Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt? Michael Orlitzky <mjo@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt? Philip Webb <purslow@××××××××.net>
Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt? Florian Schmaus <flow@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt? Mike Gilbert <floppym@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-dev] Should we join the which hunt? orbea <orbea@××××××.net>