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

["Yoann Congal" <yoann.congal@smile.fr>]

On Sat Oct 10, 2026 at 8:33 PM CEST, Collin Funk via lists.openembedded.org wrote:
> 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

For reference we also had issues with uutils-coreutils implementations:
* classes/base: prefer gnu-prefixed HOSTTOOLS - openembedded-core - OpenEmbedded Core layer
  https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=16f2684ebeffa72b5d90525cf9102751b68c298e
* 16028 – Investigate pseudo/uutils incompatibilities
  https://bugzilla.yoctoproject.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16028

Regards,
-- 
Yoann Congal
Smile ECS