On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 3:11 AM Ulrich Mueller <u...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Recently Debian has started to transition away from the "which" command. > [1] > > which is a non-POSIX command which prints out the location of specified > executables that are in your path. Unfortunately, there are several > versions of the program around which are not compatible with each other. > We package the GNU version as sys-apps/which, which is in the system set > since 2004. > > Already in 2007, vapier asked developers to avoid which in ebuilds. [2] > The replacement in most circumstances is "type -p" which is a bash > builtin command. > > So, should we join the "which hunt", with the goal of removing > sys-apps/which from the system set and from stage1? I think the first > step would be to identify which packages use which, and add it as an > explicit dependency. (Maybe the tinderbox could help there?) A bug for > this [3] has already been filed by mgorny some time ago. > > Unfortunately, the command pops up in unexpected places, e.g. it appears > to be an (indirect) build-time dependency of systemd. [4]
"which" is a built-in command in bash, but not in dash. For most users, /bin/sh points at bash and I don't expect to see much breakage when /usr/bin/which is removed. The bug reports will come from people who like pain and run their systems with /bin/sh pointed at dash.
