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On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 3:11 AM Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote: |
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> |
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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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"which" is a built-in command in bash, but not in dash. For most |
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users, /bin/sh points at bash and I don't expect to see much breakage |
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when /usr/bin/which is removed. The bug reports will come from people |
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who like pain and run their systems with /bin/sh pointed at dash. |
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