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

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> Wed, 1 Jul 2026 20:57:32 +0300
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 10:51:17AM -0700, Collin Funk wrote:
> Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> >> > Just to for the record:
> >> > 
> >> > My issue is not at all with you adding variants, uutils or otherwise. My
> >> > issue is with you silent changing the "coreutils" package to be uutils
> >> > coreutils. Your message does nothing to address that point.
> >> 
> >> ...an experimental upload...
> >> ...for a specific purpose requested by another developer for a test...
> >> ...months ago, with no follow-up uploads or discussion afterwards...
> >> ...and with later uploads of the coreutils package that have absolutely
> >>    no trace of these changes...
> >> 
> >> ...so I would say this is *exactly* what Debian experimental is for -
> >> experiments that may never see another upload, ever, depending on
> >> how things turn out.
> >
> > ...and just in case it wasn't clear from my message, let me spell it out:
> >
> > From the beginning of this thread, I was pretty much sure that this was
> > NOT any conspiracy to, secretly, without discussion, replace Debian's
> > coreutils package.
> >
> > After Julian Andres's message, I became 100% certain of that.
> 
> Just to reiterate, I had seen the experimental update months ago. I
> agree that it is perfectly fine to do that.
> 
> The only reason I became concerned was upon seeing this text on a site
> managed by another Debian developer (who does not maintain the
> "coreutils" package):
> 
>     Debian is also following Ubuntu's path toward making uutils the
>     default.
> 
> I do not think it is an unreasonable assumption to think that one would
> discuss on debian-devel before making definitive claims like this.

Well, IMHO it kind of is, since the package maintainer said that
no change would be made without discussion. Another developer making
a non-maintainer upload of coreutils to unstable (NOT experimental!)
would really be extremely, and I do mean extremely, unusual, and
it would indeed be a cause of concern. But that never happened :)

So your main worry stems from a sentence on the uttils website, which
has subsequently been removed, possibly as a result of this thread :)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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