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

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> Wed, 1 Jul 2026 21:02:11 +0300
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 08:57:32PM +0300, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> 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.

...wait, I worded that wrong. In short, yes, I absolutely agree with you
that a switch to uutils coreutils requires discussion on d-devel
(which never happened, and there was no switch). And yes, I agree
that the claim may have been too strong...

>  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 :)

...but that was all on the uutils website, not in the Debian archive,
not on the d-devel list :)

G'luck,
Peter

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