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From: | Kilian Evang |
Subject: | Re: GNU Parallel Bug Reports Latest parallel in non-default prefix gives |
Date: | Wed, 01 Jul 2015 13:37:55 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.7.0 |
Hi, I stumbled upon the same problem described by the OP of this thread: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parallel/2014-08/msg00011.html The verdict was:
So the first thing you should do is contact root and explain him that one should only use --tollef if one knows what one is doing. Doing it by default is a very bad idea, and when packagers do that, they are doing it wrong. Feel free to quote the author of GNU Parallel for saying so.
Yeah, why would packagers do such a stupid thing? Could it be because *the GNU Parallel NEWS file itself suggested so back in 2011*? I quote:
By putting --tollef in the site wide config file you can deinstall Tollef's parallel and install GNU Parallel instead without any change for users or scripts. This is useful for packagers that currently rename GNU Parallel or simply do not distribute GNU Parallel because the command name conflicts with Tollef's parallel.
It gets better: apparently this use case was why GNU Parallel *introduced support for a site-wide configuration file in the first place*.
So as a result we have this situation where --tollef is in /etc/parallel/config in many distros (Ubuntu 12.04 in my case) and prevents users who are not root from using recent versions of GNU Parallel.
So especially seeing this history, I think GNU Parallel users would be much better served by continuing to silently support --tollef for the time being, as long as it's overriden by --gnu.
Kilian
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