On 2021-09-15 01:36 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > This is a request to override the maintainer of debianutils on several > changes that were done to the package in unstable after the release of > bullseye. ... > 2. The "which" program must not print any deprecation warnings. > > The deprecation warning is misleading, and it is actually what > causes most breakage. > > For non-interactive usage, "which" printing a deprecation warning > is breaking many scripts. Just to record a relevant example which is not yet in a bug report (because tensorflow is not yet in the archive, only NEW, so no-one can file bugs against it). Use of which inside the bazel build system (in a .bzl script) (which at least tensorflow does, there may be others), causes an FTBFS because of the deprecation message. Probably this could be fixed (it's not clear exactly which layer of the system is erroring when it probably shouldn't), but a proper transition plan would mean that I would never even notice this. One which would replace another and nothing would break. That is the sort of thing I expect to happen in Debian - we are generaly good at this stuff, and it's a big reason for using the distro. I agree with Helmut's points about unnecessarily prescriptive requests to the TC, and also with his point that time matters. Right now I have to jump through hoops to build an out-of-archive which and have that local package available in the build environment in order to do any work (or go off on a tangent trying to fix bazel, or I guess I could make a nobbled local debianutils - it's all a similar level of significant hassle). If the debianutils change was just reverted I could get back to my day-job. Probably this sort of breakage was not expected by the debianutils maintainer, but it's real, and quite disruptive. I would like to add my support for a quick revert for now, followed by a more considered approach to get whatever it is done that people want. I'm sure we can work out one that doesn't break random existing which (and tempfile) usages. I appreciate Adrian bringing this to the committee and hope they can move a bit faster than usual to revert stuff so we can all have another go at this, and I can go back to not caring at all where 'which' comes from, or even which which is in use. (The only good thing about this whole thing has been the opportunity for whichy wordplay :-) Cheers Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature