Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Aaron Toponce ⚛️:debian: (atoponce@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:37:02 JST Aaron Toponce ⚛️:debian:

   #Ubuntu is moving away from GNU coreutils to Rust-based uutils coreutils with Ubuntu 25.10. There are two big differences with this move:

   1. uutils coreutils is MIT licensed, not GPL.
   2. Obviously, it's written in Rust, a memory-safe compiled language, unlike C.

   IMO, this is a good move.

   https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995

   #gnu #rust #linux

   • Embed this notice
     Aaron Toponce ⚛️:debian: (atoponce@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:37:01 JST Aaron Toponce ⚛️:debian:

     in reply to

     • Chris Siebenmann

     @cks Agreed. I haven't looked over the source code, but 100% compatibility is an optimistic claim I think. GNU coreutils is 35 years old. That's a long time for one-off quirks to get implemented for all sorts of edge cases.

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:37:01 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Chris Siebenmann
     @atoponce @cks Well given uutils grabs coreutils testsuite I wouldn't be too worried on that part, at least not much more than going from one coreutils version to the other given that those break API.
     
     What worries me more about uutils is it's maintenance, it's a pretty large codebase and with quite a lot of dependencies so unlike a C codebase with mostly just a Unix-like libc as dependency I'd expect a lot more churn.
     Phantasm likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Mar-2025 06:37:02 JST Chris Siebenmann

     in reply to

     @atoponce I look forward with dread to discovering all of the little quirks of GNU coreutils behavior that are not actually duplicated in uutils. ('100% compatibility' is nice in theory but I don't believe it's going to be achieved in the first major release, not even by 26.04 LTS, and I don't think Canonical will care.)