Re: news item: Introduction of app-alternatives/coreutils

On Mon, 23 Mar 2026 at 01:48, Eli Schwartz <[email protected]> wrote:
> This would be the fourth time we add app-alternatives packages. And the
> *first* time that we create a news item for it at all, let alone
> specifically create a news item not to tell people the app-alternatives
> exists, but try to advise them how to edit a USE flag.
>
> It is genuinely unprecedented.

Let's see how https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo/pulls/89#issuecomment-11950407
pans out. Maybe we can then decide that no news item is needed at all.

> No, the link you offer is *not* doing what you say it is doing.

Not sure what link you're talking about here.

> If it's just a USE flag why do we need a news item to explain it?

I find the fixation about documenting the USE flag a bit weird. I've
stated many times that the main purpose of the news item is
troubleshooting. It's definitely not about advocating for uutils, if I
was writing the news item in a more opinionated tone, I would
recommend users to stick with gnu.

The opt-in instructions are just in-passing, just 3 lines out of 79.
You wouldn't write a news item just for that, but it's IMHO in-topic
there. I feel your resistance to documenting the opt-in is less about
the news-worthyness and more about preventing uutils from gaining
traction.

> But completions work fine? Why should I, or anyone, care that
> completions for newly created binaries that exist for internal
> implementation details of how app-alternatives provides switchable
> symlinks, don't get completed?

They work ok, but the ones from bash-completion are not as good as the
ones from uutils. For example, they only complete --long-options for
many utils, like `cut`. A user having experienced the uutils
completion might be disappointed by the system-wide ones.

I agree that this is only a tangential remark, I don't mind deleting it.

> ... obviously I don't feel the way you do or I wouldn't object that the
> news item needs changing in order to do so.
>
> Please elaborate why you feel that this proposed news item already
> "essentially" only explains how to be careful in emerge -uDN @world to
> migrate defaults+oldrepo --> defaults+newrepo, given it is full of
> information about "choices"?

1-5: metadata
7-13: introduction
17-19: uutils opt-in
21-28: delaying the update
32-39: describe failure mode
41-45: simple issue avoidance
47-68: fixing bigger breakage
70-73: describe gotcha
77-79: Further reading

By my count, about 2/3rd of this text is about potential issues and
fixes. 4% is about the opt-in.