[kbenson]

Regardless of whether 'command -v' is a better alternative, 'which' is ensconced as standard practice in many shell scripts, and I would go so far as to say I think the majority of them that actually have to choose between the two use 'which'.

Given that, having it print out a deprecation warning without considering what that means to all the people that use it is irresponsible. I help manage a few hundred servers. We send root email to a list and actually review it all every day. We make sure to sanitize anything run from cron so that we only get email output on error (STDERR). Given that some of those cron jobs run quite often, this would have been thousands of emails to sift through if we used Debian.

There were many possible solutions, as the maintainer notes. Unfortunately in trying to remove themself from the decision, they forced a non-solution on everyone that is disruptive. I can't think of any way this is a good choice for this particular set of facts (I can see a deprecation warning being warranted for some other things, but this case has little to do factually with those theoretical situations).

[inkyoto]

> 'which' is ensconced as standard practice in many shell scripts

Ugh. Now that the UNIX universe has collapsed unto Linux, BSD's and very, very few other *X's, it is less of an issue, but «which», due to it having never been enshrined in standards, has never been safe to use in shell scripts, and an invocation could yield a suprise for the unprepared. At least on Solaris (if I am not mistaken), the «which» output yields *two* lines, of which the first is useless (along the lines of «ohiyo, lookie at what I have found») and with the second being the actual path to the binary. So «which» has never been truly portable and safe to use.

[kbenson]

I agree! Nothing I said was really to do with how scripts should be written, it's about how they are and how they have been written for decades at this point. People would be better served by not using which, and using something portable.

None of that helps this specific situation at all, which seems to have been poorly thought out in that it had the possibility of negatively affect many people, and not just the developers/admins who write scripts, but those that use what other people have written.

It's important to strive for chance for the better, but it's also important to see the world for how it actually is and what happens if that change happens all at once, which can (hopefully temporarily) be worse than what came before.

[lucb1e]

> having it print out a deprecation warning without considering what that means to all the people that use it

Virtually every command can fail in some way, and they will all write to stderr (or worse, stdout, but that's not what happened here). How is that unexpected at all? How else would you communicate the change? (For the sake of argument, let's say the change is going to happen regardless, since you're arguing for the irresponsibleness of showing a warning.)