I'm still mad at whoever removed screen from redhat.
Debian's Which Hunt
161–170 of 257 posts
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#162Earlier 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…
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!
Wouldn't stop me. :D
Come to think of it, I never checked what Manjaro even means.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#163Earlier 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 moved to Debian (almost 20 years ago) because the upgrade was the _least disruptive_.
YMMV, Debian isn't for everyone, but it's been rock solid for me with very few exceptions, far fewer than I've seen from other folks with other distributions.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Wouldn't stop me. :D Come to think of it, I never checked what Manjaro even means.
As the meme goes, you can use Arch without telling anyone about it
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#165There's a problem with "command -v," in that it's not actually a command. It's a Bourne shell builtin.
You can't use `command -v` in csh or other shells, only in Bourne style shells (bash, zsh, etc).
/usr/bin/which is a standalone binary. It can be invoked without a shell at all.
Many comments discussing `command` being part of POSIX are I think missing that `command` is only part of POSIX insofar as the Bourne shell is defined by POSIX. It is part of a POSIX `/bin/sh` and is not its own thing.
Keeping /usr/bin/which is the correct decision and it should probably be added to POSIX.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#166> * 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).
There is no man or info page for "command" on Ubuntu, I guess it's just a bash builtin ("which command" doesn't find it). "which" has a man page though.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#167Seems like this is a case of Debian governance working as designed. I'm surprised that 'which' isn't POSIX though.
Still a gigantic waste of everyone time. They could just have kept which has it has been for more than a decade and nothing would have happened. That's the decision that prevailed in the end but the fact that it had to go all the way to the Technical Committee before sanity prevailed says a lot about the utter madness of the Debian development process.
The maintainer wanted to no longer support a part of their package. In almost every single situation this would have a natural result with the maintainer stopping to support the thing they don't want to spend their volunteer time on and any other developer who want to support it could pick it up.
It is actually a bit insane that the committee is forcing a developer to support something against their will in a project based on volunteers. It is basically an artifact of the concept of essential packages and an situation where multiple different versions could cause instability, and so until the program can be moved to a different essential package the best move for the project was to keep things as they were.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#168I'm a descriptivist when it comes to standards. When everyone uses `which`, POSIX should add it. "but it's non-standard!" can be fixed by making it a standard.
I don't understand why people even care about POSIX in 2021. It's not like Linux distributions are POSIX certified. So many things can't be good because it's not in POSIX or because POSIX requires something else. People actually force themselves to write scripts in some mythical POSIX shell that nobody uses.
There are some cases where it makes sense. For example let's say I was developing something like a build script for ncurses: that runs on many different systems, and sticking to POSIX for compatibility makes sense there. There still quite a bit of stuff like that.
But a lot of the time I see people write some shell script that's Linux or BSD specific in the first place as "compatible" shell scripts. I don't see how that makes much sense. The only advantage I can see is that dash is a bit faster than bash or zsh, but it's not that much of a difference in real scripts.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#169I'm a descriptivist when it comes to standards. When everyone uses `which`, POSIX should add it. "but it's non-standard!" can be fixed by making it a standard.
Also, POSIX is basically irrelevant now. There are only two Unixen that anyone uses: RMS/Linux and whatever outdated garbage userspace Apple is shipping with macOS.
That's just not true. There are various BSD systems, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. still exists, Alpine uses busybox.
Hell, I still see people being stuck with csh scripting sometimes with no alternative (sucks to be them!)
There is some common software that wants to run on all these platforms. Do you or I need to care about that for our Docker build script or whatnot? No, probably not. But that doesn't mean others don't. There's still very much a valid use-case for POSIX, even though it doesn't apply to everything.
Re: Debian's Which Hunt
#170There's a problem with "command -v," in that it's not actually a command. It's a Bourne shell builtin. You can't use `command -v` in csh or other shells, only in Bourne style shells (bash, zsh, etc). /usr/bin/which is a standalone binary. It can be invoked without a shell at all. Many comments discussing `command` being part of POSIX are I think missing that `command` is only part of POSIX insofar as the Bourne shell…
You can use command -v in any POSIX compliant shell. csh is not POSIX compliant. Your list of shells in inexhaustive to the point of being almost misleading. bash and zsh are "heavy-weight" shells, a lot of lightweight shells also support command.
If you're specifying your shebang as #!/bin/sh then you should not assume you have access to functions like type or binaries like which, but you can generally assume you have access to the command built-in.