Debian's which hunt

Posted Oct 28, 2021 20:44 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669)
In reply to: Debian's which hunt by NYKevin
Parent article: Debian's which hunt

Personally I feel if we end up with more than one which implementation in Debian we will have failed our users. For the avoidance of doubt I think there should be exactly one.

Debian's which hunt

Posted Oct 29, 2021 12:15 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

One could make the argument that some user could want to dedicate some debian machine to running some application glued together with a hodgepodge of shell scripts originally written for another implementation of 'which'. Say, GNU which as used by RH-derived distros. In which case (ha ha) it would be convenient if

a) No essential debian packages themselves would be dependent on the debianutils version of which.

b) One could choose the which implementation (ba dum tss, I'll be here all night!) to use via the alternatives mechanism.

Debian's which hunt

Posted Nov 1, 2021 9:06 UTC (Mon) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

Well, that's true, someone might want to do that. And one way they could do that is building GNU which themselves, dumping it into a private directory, and running the ball-of-mud with a suitably modified PATH. Obviously for those needing to do this, it would be more work that way. The project has to weigh up the likelyhood of Debian users needing to do this versus the costs to the project and all other users in terms of complexity, confusion, likelyhood of bugs, etc.