Re: Question about -dev thread "Introduction of app-alternatives/coreutils"

On 3/24/26 5:58 AM, Michael wrote:

> Is this uutils adoption being pushed by Canonical?  I've read bug 
> 961068, but other than an unqualified claim of better system security by 
> a passer by, I don't understand why Gentoo is considering its 
> introduction.  Is the aim of the uutils project "... to be able to use 
> the same utils on Linux, macOS, Windows and other platforms" or to 
> ensure "... that scripts can be easily transferred between platforms" 
> something Gentoo devs want to spend their time on?


IMO -- Gentoo is "considering its introduction" solely because Gentoo
values user choice, therefore users have the right to experiment, even
with foolish things that break. And we are NOT doing the work here --
only reviewing a contributor's work.

Maybe *the contributor* will get it into a shape we can live with.
Should we still reject the ability for users to choose?

As Arthur pointed out on the -dev ML, and as I earlier said in IRC,
there's a difference between "infrastructure for the choice" and
"actually configuring non-GNU coreutils to be active", and for user
safety we should package.use.mask the latter to ensure nobody tries it
without being well aware of the pitfalls.


-- 
Eli Schwartz

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