Bug#994275: Reverting breaking changes in debianutils

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 12:41:31PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> Are you arguing for a transition that makes "which" non-essential,
> or are you arguing for a transition that would remove "which" from 
> Debian?

Irrespective of the technical arguments for keeping or removing which, I
think that with a good transition removing which should not be out of
question. The actual reasons for or against doing so are less important
to me than using a process that doesn't annoy half of the developers.
For instance, I would love to ignore the /usr-merge, but I can't,
because it's breaking so much. At the point where we hardly notice the
transition, who am I to argue against it when I am unaffected?

> Currently there would be a clear violation of policy during bullseye
> to bookworm upgrades due to the program "which" that is part of the
> essential set not being available between unpack and postinst.

Thank you for explaining this in further detail. I do agree with this
and it should be documented as an rc-bug. However, it does not fully
rule out the use of alternatives. (It just feels stupid to continue
using them for all the reasons that you gave already.)

I've intentionally snipped much of your reply, because I don't think
there is much point in further discussion among us two. Consider that we
two are mostly in agreement about what I trimmed. After all, my main
point was to split a decision into a quick short-term one and a slow
long-term one. That seems to have come across.

Helmut