Hello, On 2021-09-23 12:10, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
On Thu, Sep 23, Michal Suchánek wrote:
The problem is that gawk and mawk are mutually incompatible, and some software expects non-GNU awk semantics and assumes /usr/bin/awk is traditional awk.
Of course, it should provide a way to set which awk to use but many develoipers think that the awk flavor they use is the only true awk and fishing it from non-standard location is not needed.
Then the alternatives are the workaround for such projects.
But we have much more packages which expects that /usr/bin/awk is gawk instead of anything else. So in the end you would break other packages. If a package requires a specific awk implementation (independent of gawk or mawk), it's much better to patch the package to explicit use gawk or mawk.
In general if "fool" needs a specific "tool" but "fool" only calls for anything named "tool" it is clear where the fault is. I think we should not provide workarounds for faults because that will never work reliably and even worse: When such a workaround exists "fools" will rely on it and may even demand that it is the responsibility of the workaround to make "foolish" things work ;-) Kind Regards Johannes Meixner -- SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5 - 90409 Nuernberg - Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nuernberg) GF: Felix Imendoerffer