Re: Concerning uniliateral decision making with respect to the coreutils package

Hello,

Le 27/06/2026 à 20:25, Collin Funk a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> Let me begin by mentioning that I am an active contributor to the GNU
> coreutils. I mention this for transparency, although this message
> primarily addresses social concerns that I have, rather than technical
> ones. Therefore, I hope it is not disregarded for being biased.
We are all biased and have different interests/focus :)
> As far as I can tell, the request to discuss this on debian-devel was
> never respected. The only brief discussion of coreutils on debian-devel
> since these events were when someone noticed that the "coreutils"
> package in Debian Expiremental used "coreutils-from-*" packages to
> choose between GNU, uutils, busybox, or toybox [5].

Thanks. I didn't know about this thread.

> I also noticed the uutils website says the following [6]:
>
>      Debian is also following Ubuntu's path toward making uutils the default.
>      A Google Summer of Code 2024 project - "Improve support of the Rust
>      coreutils in Debian" - was mentored to accelerate the integration. The
>      package is also inherited by downstream Debian-based distributions
>      including Raspbian, Kali Linux, Parrot OS, PureOS, and deepin 23.
It was poorly phrased. I updated the wording.
> It seems that a small handful of people are unilaterally making the
> decision to switch the default Debian install from GNU coreutils to
> uutils coreutils, which concerns me. I had hoped that the plan was to
> bring this up on debian-devel, as originally requested, but I have not
> seen any indication that is the case over the past few months.
>
> The decision to change to uutils coreutils in Ubuntu was quite
> controversial, as can easily be seen in various forum posts and bug
> reports. I believe these changes, which seem to be intentionally made in
> secret, are an attempt to avoid reigniting said controversy. I can
> understand this, as many had strong opinions, as I do, and expressed
> them rudely, which is part of the reason I have avoided linking them.
>
> However, I do not believe that it is best for Debian if decisions like
> this are made unilaterally in secret. Therefore, I am bringing awareness
> of this change to debian-devel.
>
Except a single email, I haven't been involved in any conversation for 
Debian on uutils vs gnu coreutils (I wasn't
even aware of the experimental work).
However, taking a step back, as a packager of a few important packages, 
i often do make unilateral decisions...
that can be discussed or challenged but it is the way Debian works for 
most of the work.

Also, afaik, it isn't that secret as you found some threads talking 
about it. ;)

Cheers,

Sylvestre