Re: Future of /usr/bin/which in Debian?
On Wed, Aug 18, 2021 at 08:50:04PM +0200, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Debian's implementation started out in 1995 or 1996 as a shell script
> calling 'type', and remains a shell script.
Not very important historical note: it's true that Debian had a "which"
command from 1995/1996 or so, but the current implementation doesn't
descend from that at all.
I wrote the earliest version of the current implementation from scratch,
as part of a job I held from 2000 to 2003; in that job, I worked on lots
of different Unix flavours, and we had NFS-mounted home directories so I
wanted a reasonably cross-platform ~/.bashrc. The spectacular lack of
consistent behaviour of "which" across those platforms got in my way, so
I wrote a shell script that I could put in my ~/bin and use everywhere.
I don't remember exactly when I wrote it, but it can't have been before
2000 and I think it was probably around 2002.
I contributed that script to Debian in 2002 in response to
https://bugs.debian.org/94507, where it became clear that the previous
implementation wasn't really salvageable; Clint merged that in
debianutils 1.16.5. It's been extended since then, but still has the
same basic approach.
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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