Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 15:54:50 +0200 From: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net> To: arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: whither whereis? Message-ID: <99421.1020952490@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za>
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Hi folks,
As per the "Perl scripts that need rewiting" thread on -current, Perl is
going to be removed from the base src [1]. The various perl scripts in
the base system must be removed or replaced.
I offered to tackle whereis. It seems stupid to rewrite it from
scratch, so I took at look at our fellow BSD distributions:
1) NetBSD has a standalone whereis utility written in C.
2) OpenBSD has a which utility written in C. This utility behaves like
whereis when called as such.
Neither of these implementations support all the fanciness that Joerg
threw in for free when he wrote our whereis Perl script.
My feeling is that we should adopt NetBSD or OpenBSD's implementation.
This would lose us some of the existing whereis functionality we have.
I don't think this is a real problem because:
1) whereis(1) isn't covered by POSIX/SUSv3.
2) The extra fanciness can mostly be accomplished with shell scripting.
3) I've never seen the extra fanciness used in shell scripts in the
wild.
So, can anyone think of any good reason to go in favour of one over the
other of the NetBSD and OpenBSD implementations? I'm leaning toward
OpenBSD's, because which(1) and whereis(1) share common functionality,
and so I think it makes sense that they be implemented in the same
source module.
Ciao,
Sheldon.
[1] Saying that Perl will be removed from the base _system_ has confused
a lot of people; FreeBSD installs will still include Perl by
default, but it'll come from a package (unless the default is
overridden), not the bin dist.
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