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Debian's Which Hunt

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Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#151

Post by pdimitar »

na85 wrote: post #149
pdimitar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved on from Debian some 9-10 years ago and I haven't regretted it once. Many sysadmin acquaintances and former colleagues of mine complained that upgrading Debian is often like rolling a dice (yes, even the stable and thus fairly old variant). An innocent "apt-get upgrade" moves configuration files and/or expectations where they are, or, what's even worse, changes the config files and silently moves the previous…

>or, what's even worse, changes the config files and silently moves the previous ones to another file. I run Debian on my servers because I like not having to wrestle with Yast2 or deal with the constant churn for churn's sake of certain RPM-based distros. The above quote hasn't really been a thing since at least Debian 8, and possibly 7. Certainly when it came time to upgrade to 11, if package configs were being ove…

Glad to hear it. I actually gave up exactly at Debian 8 btw.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#152

Post by kelnos »

> * The POSIX-blessed way of finding an executable program is command -v, which is consequently built into most shells. Given the standard alternative, Adams said, "surely no one competent would choose to have a package depend on `which` when a standard POSIX utility can do a better job".*

This feels a little tone-deaf to me. I've been using the *nix command-line and writing (and reading) shell scripts for 20+ years, and I'd never heard of "command -v" until now. Now that I know about it, I'll probably start trying to retrain my muscle memory to use it (though it requires 2x the number of keystrokes).

Despite its lack of true standardization, "which" (along with "type -p") has been the de-facto "standard" I've seen in shell scripts for figuring out if a command exists. It was a surprise to me to learn that "which" isn't a part of POSIX, even.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#154

Post by exporectomy »

verve_rat wrote: post #135
exporectomy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amazing thing is 'which' was working perfectly fine for everyone. 'everyone' = existing users. New users are generally harmed by redundancy and mess.

New users are also harmed by change. Our user manuals are the Google index, so change mean those manuals become outdated. As in all things, it is a balancing act.

Sure, there's balance. The idea that it was working fine so why change it leads to gigantic bloated software that nobody can really understand.

As an anecdote. I developed a product in a field where the main players were extremely well established with codebases dating back to punch card days. Their software could do everything you might imagine wanting it to do. But it was also so complex, you had to take a training course to learn it. But what's interesting is there were customers of those competitors who also bought my product because it was quicker and easier to get common things done. All that power actually let to a worse product in some ways.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#155

Post by akomtu »

overgard wrote: post #103

When I read stuff like this I can't help but wonder how anything ever even gets done on this project. The amazing thing is 'which' was working perfectly fine for everyone. Just leave it alone? The amount of time they wasted on debating this is staggering compared to just not changing it.

For a perfectionist like that dude, the imperfect "which" is nails on chalkboard. He also gets to scratch his ego which justifies any amount of time wasted by others.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#156

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

emptyparadise wrote: post #7

Seems like this is a case of Debian governance working as designed. I'm surprised that 'which' isn't POSIX though.

The POSIX shell builtin command -v basically already functions like which, and the whole purpose of which is to tell you where in $PATH a command is

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#157

Post by kelnos »

pxc wrote: post #84
jagger27 wrote: post #66

Here's how zsh 5.8 behaves on macOS: $ which {which,type,command,vi} which: shell built-in command type: shell built-in command command: shell built-in command /usr/bin/vi $ type {which,type,command,vi} which is a shell builtin type is a shell builtin command is a shell builtin vi is /usr/bin/vi $ command -v {which,type,command,vi} which type command /usr/bin/vi Which is quite different from how bash 5.1 behaves: bas…

Wait what macOS has an executable called `command`? Does any other OS?

The article points out that "command -v" is the only thing in this mess that's actually standardized by POSIX as "print out the path to the thing specified".

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#158

Post by belorn »

overgard wrote: post #103

When I read stuff like this I can't help but wonder how anything ever even gets done on this project. The amazing thing is 'which' was working perfectly fine for everyone. Just leave it alone? The amount of time they wasted on debating this is staggering compared to just not changing it.

The standard approach is to let the maintainer make all decision in their own supported packages. This works in 99.99% of the time and if someone else wants to do the work of supporting a package then there are always alternatives. Being asked to do the work of supporting a whole package is generally a rather large commitment and Debian developers tend to be busy enough that fighting over being the maintainer of larger packages isn't that common, especially if the contention is over a small thing.

That is how things get done. If you do the work you get to decide.

In the 0.001% that an issue get taken up by the technical committee as being important for the whole project, then after usually a long time they make a decision that in special cases may overrule the maintainer. That happens about once or twice a year? I am unsure how often a decision actually goes against the maintainer, and there is only a few cases a year (https://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte).

This naturally doesn't stop anyone from being too active on the mailing lists and arguing over small things, but I would think people are wasting less time there than they do arguing lesser important topics on social media.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#159

Post by liquidise »

kelnos wrote: post #152

> * The POSIX-blessed way of finding an executable program is command -v, which is consequently built into most shells. Given the standard alternative, Adams said, "surely no one competent would choose to have a package depend on `which` when a standard POSIX utility can do a better job".* This feels a little tone-deaf to me. I've been using the *nix command-line and writing (and reading) shell scripts for 20+ years,…

My story would echo this same sentiment. Incidentally, running `man command` on OS X actually does not reference a '-v' option at all, instead only stating the more verbose `command which`. Both appear to work, but it further highlights your (our) discoverability issue(s).

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#160

Post by ehPReth »

pdimitar wrote: post #144
bachmeier wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I read stuff like this I can't help but wonder how anything ever even gets done on this project. Many years ago, I posted that stable was too old. All the Debian users were quick to tell me to run testing, that it wasn't a bad experience in spite of the name. Well, after converting all my machines to Debian, a package that was critical to my work was broken and I was not at all impressed with the handling of t…

I moved on from Debian some 9-10 years ago and I haven't regretted it once. Many sysadmin acquaintances and former colleagues of mine complained that upgrading Debian is often like rolling a dice (yes, even the stable and thus fairly old variant). An innocent "apt-get upgrade" moves configuration files and/or expectations where they are, or, what's even worse, changes the config files and silently moves the previous…

I went to Fedora myself.. even though it kinda has a cringey name now-a-days thanks to meme culture :/

“tips fedora” “neckbeard” etc. I’m actually afraid to mention I use it to some groups!

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