[Enginerrrd]

What a mess. It sounds like command -v should have been the default from the get go and which should never have been introduced to debianutils. Once it was though, IMO, debian should never make a decision that breaks existing functionality.

In general, I don't care if you extend features beyond POSIX in your core utilities, but once you do, you have to assume people rely on that functionality.

I think this is the most poignant take:

>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.

[chasil]

I am fairly certain that which came first.

This is the POSIX specification for command:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...

[Taywee]

Notable sections from that page:

> The command -v and -V options were added to satisfy requirements from users that are currently accomplished by three different historical utilities: type in the System V shell, whence in the KornShell, and which in the C shell. Since there is no historical agreement on how and what to accomplish here, the POSIX command utility was enhanced and the historical utilities were left unmodified. The C shell which merely conducts a path search. The KornShell whence is more elaborate-in addition to the categories required by POSIX, it also reports on tracked aliases, exported aliases, and undefined functions.

> The output format of -V was left mostly unspecified because human users are its only audience. Applications should not be written to care about this information; they can use the output of -v to differentiate between various types of commands, but the additional information that may be emitted by the more verbose -V is not needed and should not be arbitrarily constrained in its verbosity or localization for application parsing reasons.

[denton-scratch]

Hmm. So you have two conflicting conventions; and the solution is a third convention. Now you have three conflicting conventions.

I think I've come across this somewhere else.

[int_19h]

The third convention isn't conflicting with the rest - that's the whole point!