Re: GNU Parallel Bug Reports Latest parallel in non-default prefix gives

[Ole Tange]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Kilian Evang
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 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*.

I can see those could have been phrased better: --tollef was
introduced to let people _already_ using Tollef's parallel to continue
working seamlessly, and to allow packagers to create a package that
did this. But the key issue is that you do not put anything in
/etc/parallel/config without stressing to your users that you have
done so: IF the packagers chose to do so, the users should be informed
about this (and the consequences of this) - and preferably they should
have a choice to just get the generic GNU Parallel.

History tells us that is not what happened.

> 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.

--tollef has been obsolete with a warning for a year and retired
completely for more than a full year. I doubt that people actually
using --tollef on purpose has not converted already, and I would
reckon that it is much fewer affected.

Would it serve the users even better simply to ignore --tollef completely?


/Ole