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

On Mon, 23 Mar 2026 at 17:44, Ionen Wolkens <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 01:15:01PM -0400, Mike Gilbert wrote:
> > 1. Do nothing (maintain status quo)
> > 2. virtual/coreutils with sys-apps/coreutils and
> > sys-apps/uutils-coreutils blocking each other
> > 3. app-alternatives/coreutils
> > 4. eselect module to manage symlinks in /usr/bin
>
> That would be my order of preference as well at the moment, not
> that I'm against giving the choice per se.
>
> Regardless of what we do, I do feel it could use more time/discussion.
> What should've been a simple news item review kind of diverged into
> a RFC about the idea itself, and rushing to adapting/changing the
> implementation may just waste work.

Yes, this thread was certainly bigger than I expected. But it was a
useful discussion, thanks to all the participants, even those I
disagreed with.

To me the virtual with virtual blocker is not an option (keeping both
coreutils coinstallable is a must), and the virtual with
native-symlink is technically flawed (see my and Eli's replies to
Urlich), so I'll stick with the app-alternative solution (I was
originally more tempted by eselect, but I've been convinced
otherwise).

So I'll work on
https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo/pulls/89#issuecomment-11950407 and
come back here when it's done. That version should not necessitate a
news item. I don't think it'll be wasted work, but it's my own time
anyway.