[vidanay]

Wow, talk about a tempest in a tea kettle. Bikeshedding like this is why Linux will never achieve any significant market share for average consumers. (Because all that mental effort could have been spent on solving some real problem instead of philosophical conformity.)

[gnramires]

This is not bikeshedding, at least as I see it. Debian is used in millions of systems and many may rely on the exact output of 'which' command. Their job is to make these systems incredibly reliable, make improvements and make sure those improvements are rolled out as smoothly as possible. This is unsexy like plumbing and maintenance is unsexy, but still absolutely instrumental to society.

Linux overall has an amazing separation of concerns structure (inherited from the POSIX tradition). The user-facing details you might be worried about like the interface design etc. are all handled by separate teams that expect their base to be reliable and stable so they can make other changes.

[gnramires]

On speed of change: There is of course too slow (too stable) and too unstable. The job of a good maintainer is also to weight possible gains against the downstream effort. Each project has also its own promises -- if you project advertises stability, big changes will cause a lot of grief downstream. If your project advertises instability, users will be more ready for changes.

[dangerface]

> Their job is to make these systems incredibly reliable

They why did they switch to systemd? It seems like linux developers have nothing better to do than just rename stuff with no obvious advantage to the new standards but breaking backwards compatibility with the old standards.

[ptero]

> Bikeshedding like this is why Linux will never achieve any significant market share for average consumers.

In my opinion, this is a good thing. Aiming for increasing "market share for average consumers" usually implies focusing on the standard baseline of functionality. There is nothing wrong with this, but this invariably cuts off tinkerers and enthusiasts who care about playing with SDRs and LIDARs and other fringe capabilities as much as (and usually more than) they care about the simplicity of the WiFi setup.

For simplest possible internet browsing there is ever-simpler Windows, with its design choices such as sharing of WiFi access and creeping ads. Just my 2c.

[fnord123]

>For simplest possible internet browsing there is ever-simpler Windows, with its design choices such as sharing of WiFi access and creeping ads. Just my 2c.

Seeing as mobile internet outstrips desktop internet, and Android is the majority of mobile internet devices, the Linux kernel runs under one of the top two pluralities of client side web browsing.

[jasonjayr]

Bikeshedding like this must constantly go on on large teams internally, especially with technical leads on what the scope and how their particular part of the system functions.

Since Debian does this all out in the open, we just get to watch how the sausage is made.

[_jal]

This is a unit-shifter attitude. And I'm not trying to be rude, you need sales. But if you ignore long-term quality for short-term sizzle, you lose, at least if you're producing something like Debian.

If you don't understand why something like this is important to get right, I'd suggest maybe finding out why other people do actually care about things like this.

Or maybe reflect on why Microsoft spends so much money and energy on backwards compatibility.

[shadowgovt]

Microsoft spends so much money and energy on backwards compatibility because it's good for developers; it lets them focus on solving problems, not tracking the frameworks they need to solve problems.

The Microsoft approach would be to support `which` forever. It's not a big enough quirk to justify removing it, and it's essential for some people's development process.

[diffeomorphism]

From the article:

> 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 generally good at this stuff, and it's a big reason for using the distro.

No tempest, no bikeshedding. That seems like the polar opposite of whatever you are criticizing.

[Taywee]

I don't know how you can call it bikeshedding when it's over a change that actually broke the build process for some packages, and proposal to remove a commonly-used tool from the system. Sounds like an actual functional difference to me.

[peatmoss]

As a counterpoint, users can get very wrapped up in changes, and it sounds like the Debian project had a mechanism for resolving the conflict that wasn’t “endless flamewar.”

[emptyparadise]

Big opaque corporations definitely never spend way too much time in meetings over pointless things.

[dyingkneepad]

And most Open Source contributions to widely used projects come from people working on such corporations, being paid to do Open Source.

[moss2]

It's ironic how a comment about 'bikeshedding' spawns five comments in the span of twenty minutes.

[kwertyoowiyop]

That second coffee is just kicking in.

[shadowgovt]

One of the advantage to the more hierarchical approach found in many commercial software development houses is that someone has the authority to say "These are about the same, we're doing it this way, the decision is arbitrary, and anyone who doesn't toe the line can work on something else."

Makes it easier to avoid burning time on problems with equivalently-good solutions, or even not-equivalently-good-but-perfection-isn't-worth-the-cost-of-discovery.

[denton-scratch]

Non-hierarchical decision-making is hard work, and time-consuming. There are lots of challenges - it can be hijacked easily by arseholes, you need lots of rules that everyone has to learn, and nobody agrees on what "consensus" means.

Nevertheless, I think that if you can make it work then you get better decisions. Debian's been pretty good at it (systemd aside :-)