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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

This might affect me and other Debian stable users in the year 2025. The conservative side of the FOSS world rocks.

exa's great; it's a polished, feature-rich ls(1) that broadly improves on GNU ls. The --tree view is awesome; I wish more tools used that UX pattern. The only other one I can immediately remember is pstree.

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I have the opposite feeling about package lethargy, I don't want to remember that exa is now eza at the time that my distro finally gets around to packaging eza, I want to do it now when it's right in front of me.

I'll go try lsd instead (and then I'll try the other ls rewrite, har har)

Ehh, I guess I'm your opposite. I want to be insulated from exciting upstream developments, especially for stable, boring stuff like coreutils. I want those to be boring. I don't want "exa is now eza" or whatever push-notified to my command line on a random Tuesday.

I want those to be boring for my scripts; I want modern replacements for my manual use.

I guess so, I've been running Arch on most of my servers for the last decade. Sometimes the fragmentation of the ecosystem comes in handy!

Yet you read hacker news, where you get pushed the latest thing every day

In case you are an Arch user, eza is already there.

The Debian maintainer of the exa package can, and probably will, either:

- just add a backward compat alias

- make eza a transitive dependency so that exa can be sunset cleanly and adds a NEWS file entry that every user will see on upgrade to the version that drops the exa binary.

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