Michael Stone wrote:
I think it doesn't matter how many which implementations are in debian. If you want something with specific portable semantics, just use command -v. The remaining consumers of which are either programs that (ipso facto) don't care about semantic corner cases or are humans who want to use which just because, and probably have strong opinions on how it should behave (as, apparently, you do).
*I* don't; in Clint's categorization¹ I fall into (d) "wants there to be exactly one version of `which` (except for all the shell builtins) so that alternatives won't confuse and complicate things". The point I've tried to make (too clumsily I guess) is the process of choosing one should not be shoot-from-the-hip: there should be some consideration as to which `which` would be the best fit for Debian. I hadn't seen any evidence of that, until, On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 05:41:49PM -0400, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
I also think it may be more reasonable to prefer (by default, using the alternatives mechanism) the more LSBish one (in this case GNU) rather than the potentially more simple, clean, and full-featured one (BSD).
^ this is an example of exactly what I would have hoped took place to decide upon which `which` we provided.
Thankfully we have the /etc/alternatives and Provides mechanisms to affirm user choice in such cases, and I think most of us will agree this is a totally equitable and reasonable compromise :-)
Unless there's a really compelling reason for there to be more than one `which`, we could avoid the burden of alternatives entirely. I should get off my soapbox now. ¹ Message-ID: <yugsrpfvtepsf...@scru.org> -- Please do not CC me for listmail. 👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland ✎ j...@debian.org 🔗 https://jmtd.net