logoalt Hacker News

Analemma_today at 4:50 AM3 repliesview on HN

I know nobody's perfect and I'm not asking for perfection, but these bugs are pretty alarming? It seems like these supposed coreutils replacements are being written by people who don't know anything about Unix, and also didn't even bother looking at the GNU tools they are trying to replace. Or at least didn't have any curiosity about why the GNU tools work the way they do. Otherwise they might've wondered about why things operate on bytes and file descriptors instead of strings and paths.

I hate to armchair general, but I clicked on this article expecting subtle race conditions or tricky ambiguous corners of the POSIX standard, and instead found that it seems to be amateur hour in uutils.


Replies

chiffaatoday at 6:25 AM

Few things to note

1. uutils as a project started back in 2013 as a way to learn Rust, by no means by knowledgeable developers or in a mature language

2. uutils didn't even have a consideration to become a replacement of GNU Coreutils until.... roughly 2021, I think? 2021 is when they started running compliance/compatibility tests, anyway

3. The choice of licensing (made in 2013) effectively forbids them from looking at the original source

lelanthrantoday at 4:57 AM

> It seems like these supposed coreutils replacements are being written by people who don't know anything about Unix, and also didn't even bother looking at the GNU tools they were supposed to be replacing.

They're a group of people who want to replace pro-user software (GPL) with pro-business software (MIT).

I don't really want them to achieve their goal.

ronjakoitoday at 5:35 AM

They are deliberately not looking at coreutils code because the Rust versions are released as MIT and they don't want the project contaminated by GPL. I am not fond of this, personally.