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>>>>> On Fri, 13 May 2022, Philip Webb wrote: |
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>> Recently Debian has started to transition away from the "which" command. |
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>> [1] |
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> Do we take Debian as a role model ? |
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No, but it is additional input. Note that our own activities [2,3] |
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started earlier than that. |
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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, |
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>> which is in the system set since 2004. |
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> If there is a GNU version, that would seem to be somewhat "official". |
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> Also, it's been around a long time. |
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It's been around at least since the 1980s but in spite of this it was |
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never standardised. The GNU version exists since 1999 and had its last |
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release in 2015. |
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>> Already in 2007, vapier asked developers to avoid which in ebuilds. [2] |
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> There well mb good reasons for the devs to do that, |
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> but users may have different needs or preferences. |
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Nobody is asking to drop the sys-apps/which package, so users can |
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install it if they like the command. Gentoo is about choice, so we |
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shouldn't force installation for everybody if the package isn't needed |
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in @system. (The same applies to sys-apps/less BTW, but that's a |
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different story.) |
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Ulrich |
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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 |
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