[stonogo]

I find it interesting that Debian even cares whether 'which' is POSIX or not, given that they don't ship a lot of POSIX commands (e.g. 'ed' and 'bc') by default. It seems to me much of the value in such a standard is you can either rely on it or not; deliberately omitting some of the specified utilities, then using other utilities as arguments in a systems architeecture discussion seems like a self-contradiction. Unfortunately the Debian wiki entry on POSIX merely defines it and doesn't enlighten us as to policy decisions.

[denton-scratch]

Debian's a bit funny. Maintainers tinker with packages more often than I'd like; they make changes to packages that already work perfectly well, and sometimes breakage occurs.

This is partly because of the autonomy that Debian package maintainers enjoy. I have slightly mixed feelings about that - but only slightly. I'd sooner have maintainer autonomy, and seriously-distributed decision making, than an overlord.