On Thu, 17 Apr 2025, Josh Triplett wrote:
One is "should we make dependencies on awk explicit, rather than having
them be implicit and undocumented because awk is Essential".
The other is "should we reduce dependencies on awk".
One of the things I dislike about awk being in the essential set is the
weird effect that dependencies on awk are hidden unless a package
depends on a particular implementation for some reason.
Some packages have a dependency on awk via the individual variants,
prettyping being one where I think it is probably pointless in practice.
i3lock-fancy is more weird as it also includes versions of "awk" that
don't satisfy awk.
More than half of packages that depend on mawk also depend on gawk,
which I guess is saying that they don't work with original-awk (except
for the packages that depend on all 3)
And gawk is definitely the winner in packages that require that specific
implementation. (I've not checked for non awk satisfying options)
