Re: [PATCH] uutils-coreutils: move from meta-openembedded

[Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com>]

Etienne Cordonnier <ecordonnier@snap.com> wrote:

> uutils-coreutils, the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils, is mature
> enough for production use, so move the recipe from meta-oe to oe-core.
> It provides and rprovides coreutils, and is excluded from world unless
> selected as the coreutils provider.

Total disregard for the requirements imposed by the GPL is helpful to it
being "mature enough for production use", of course. See the downplayed
mention in the 0.12.0 release notes:

    Also, some contributions had carried comments and code over from GNU
    coreutils, against our own rule that uutils is an original
    implementation. We reviewed the tree and rewrote what we found, in
    comments and in the few functions that followed the C too closely;
    no behaviour change. The GNU coreutils maintainers have been
    notified.

> +SUMMARY = "coreutils ~ GNU coreutils (updated); implemented as universal (cross-platform) utils, written in Rust"

This summary reads as if it is trying to claim that uutils is the
official GNU coreutils project.

I'm not familiar enough with openembedded, but a concern raised by other
distributions and me is that supporting two packages as "coreutils"
increases maintainers' workload because the implementations are bound to
diverge, requiring otherwise unnecessary code churn. E.g., for around a
year, Ubuntu 26.04 had the following:

    $ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
    $ printf 'USA\nU.S.A\nU-S-A\n' | sort -u
    USA
    $ printf 'USA\nU.S.A\nU-S-A\n' | gnusort -u
    U-S-A
    U.S.A
    USA

It still has the following issue [1]:

    $ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
    $ echo a A b B | tr ' ' '\n' | sort > tst1.txt
    $ echo a A b C | tr ' ' '\n' | sort > tst2.txt
    $ comm -23 tst1.txt tst2.txt
    comm: file 1 is not in sorted order
    comm: file 2 is not in sorted order
    B
    comm: input is not in sorted order
    $ gnucomm -23 tst1.txt tst2.txt
    B

Collin

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bug/2169780