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

Hakan Bayındır <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I personally don't understand the passive-aggressive push to replace 
gnu-coreutils with uutils package. gnu-coreutils is a well baked and 
battle tested code over the years and its license is an important pillar 
alongside Kernel's GPL license to keep the operating system free, open 
and accessible to all.

Is gnu-coreutils perfect no? But, do a Rust rewrite solves all problems 
in one go? It's glaring No, as we see. I have a hunch that not the code 
but the license is what makes uutils attractive, but I refrain from 
speculating further.

The CVEs introduced and the heavy handed, "we do because we can" 
approach is damaging beyond just Debian, but Linux distributions 
ecosystem at large. Also there's erosion of GPL licensed foundational 
code as the secondary effect.

I can accept uutils to live as an alternative, but not default coreutils 
package for Debian, but replacing to make Canonical's life better is not 
something I support.

With all due respect,

H.

On 29.06.2026 ÖÖ 5:50, Theodore Tso wrote:
> I will note that Ubuntu's rewrite of coreutils breaks a number of test
> suites (including xfstests) because its outputs are different and this
> breaks golden output comparisons.  I expect it will also break various
> expect scripts that sysadmins might have in production.
> 
> Bug reports about fstests being broken on Ubuntu have been rejected[1]
> because it's perceived by kernel developers as Ubuntu just being
> silly(tm).  Given that some rather the primary test regression
> appliance is based on Debian[2], I would consider it.... unfortunate
> and regrettable if coreutils were replaced by Canonical's rust
> rewrite.  And that's before we consider the over 100 CVE's that were
> *introduced* by the rewrite of coreutils[3].
> 
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/fstests/[email protected]/
> [2] https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests
> [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Rust-Coreutils-Audit
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 					- Ted
>
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