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

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

Etienne Cordonnier <ecordonnier@snap.com> said:

> - what is achieved by moving it to core is improving no-gplv3.inc for users
> who are not using gplv3 and still want full coreutils syntax support. It
> will also make it possible to add it to poky-altcfg.conf, and generally
> make it easier to consume without needing meta-openembedded.

That, of course, assumes none of the code is tainted after the attempted
cleanup in 0.12.0, which only came after multiple warnings from me. It
is difficult, speaking personally, for me to believe that the uutils
project has any respect at all for licensing.

>   - its adoption in Ubuntu 26.04 as default coreutils implementation and
> the resulting large-scale usage and bug-fixing

That is the positive side of things. The negative side is that there
were many FTBFS and multiple breakages of Ubuntu ISOs. E.g., one missing
a setuid bit on sudo. I highly doubt Canonical engineers enjoy dealing
with this. It seems to be a decision made by the company leadership. I
can't say for certain, though, since Canonical didn't reach out to me or
anyone else working on GNU coreutils, who could have warned them about
the easily foreseeable issues they faced.

>   - its >95% pass-rate of the GNU testing suite in release 0.0.12 (some
> tests are still skipped)

Note that the GNU coreutils test suite is good, in my biased opinion,
but it is not really meant to create a new, perfectly compatible
implementation to replace us. I have always found the use of these
percentages dubious, but I understand the need for some comparison.

> Also rust binaries are bigger than C binaries so there is some
> tradeoff involved. GNU coreutils 9.12 main package is 10.3MB big in my
> test build, compared to 13.6MB for the uutils-coreutils 0.0.12 main
> package (uutils-coreutils uses a multi-binary executable to save
> space, GNU coreutils doesn't).

This is a very unfair comparison. GNU coreutils has been able to be
built as a single binary since 2014 [1]. If there were a need for it in
meta-openembedded, I am sure it could be packaged relatively easily. Red
Hat uses it for their container images, for example:

    $ podman run --rm -it redhat/ubi10
    $ du --human-readable /bin/coreutils
    1.4M    /bin/coreutils

Collin

[1] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/71e2ea773414b2316bbe6b803b9a52c38d3752e8