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What an absolute shitshow

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[-] pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 50 points 3 days ago

Rust-rewriting is a kind of madness. I like Rust, it's an amazing language. But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won't make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

The MIT license also is a concern. I understand that many projects use it, and we can't just reject them because of the license. But here we don't see an innovation under MIT license - we see a copy of existing GNU tools, with hilarious issues and a corporation-friendly license.

The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

And the quality level of uutils being already shipped tells they either make free alpha testers for the corpos of the users, or there were no competent programmers to take part in the development.

C will remain the core of the modern digital world for many years. It is impossible to rewrite everything to Rust in a couple of years. It needs a careful professional approach if we really want this to make software better. But in this case, no one does.

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old "stable" C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).

The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

I don't think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal... but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(

[-] pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Eliminating some obscure bugs from C code is not worth intruducing a lot of new bugs. GNU coreutils have been used and polished for so long, that it would be far more effective just to fix the issues as they reveal right in the original code. If rewriting removes one kind of bugs while introducing another - then what's the whole point?

I cannot imagine obviously buggy code from 2020s being more secure than code that has been around since previous century. Again, even if Rust for real is a better solution for security reasons, the way it is being developed and shipped is not how one makes software more secure. Disregarding the license, uutils look like something pursuing hype, not strategical benefits.

[-] PushButton@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

But bruh, "if it compiles, it works". Who needs testing now that we have blazing safe rust with AI?

"Ship fast and break things", bruh.

That's the sad point where the software industry is at these days.

In a few years people will be locked-in with some proprietary Linux distro variants made by big tech and they will wonder how that happened.

People show stop a moment and reflect on why the GNU license exists in the first place.

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[-] somegeek@programming.dev 60 points 3 days ago

The real shitshow is it's MIT licensing. Corporate takeover 101

[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 days ago

Corporate takeover?

Ubuntu has always belong to a corporation.

It's not like it's a community project. Ubuntu has always belonged to Canonical.

[-] somegeek@programming.dev 8 points 3 days ago

Coreutils isn't only for ubuntu. Ubuntu just seems to be the lab rat corporation.

[-] fodor@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago

There are many kinds of corporations, my friend. Canonical is different from Apple. Wait a second... Wasn't OS X built on FreeBSD?

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[-] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 33 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I love rust, but I absolutely hate how it's used to jam MIT licenses where GPL belongs. Maybe it's time we consider using corpos tools against them, and use an AI to rewrite GNU utils to Rust, so that people can continue contributing to Rust while not feeding corps?

Edit: Though licensing AI software is iffy at best, you've got to own the copyright to something to licence it: Non-human productions are legally non-copyrightable. Also it might be better to just have humans do it anyway. The intent of my message was just that maybe we ought to deprive MIT-licensed projects from FOSS-motivated developers by providing Rust GPL alternatives to MIT/corporate Rust projects

[-] bradboimler@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Isn't the MIT license independent of the choice of Rust?

[-] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 days ago

Rust often ends up just being an excuse to rewrite software with corporate-friendly licenses without copyleft. That's not necessarily true though, Lemmy itself is Rust & licenced under AGPL

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 days ago

You can use rust and still use the GPL.

[-] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago

My issue isn't with Rust as a language at all, I quite enjoy making my projects with it. My issue is with "Rust rewrites" of GPL software, only to have those rewrites be licensed under MIT/Apache. To me it signifies that these rewrites were never about the safety features of Rust, but that they are attempts at pushing out the GPL

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 60 points 4 days ago

What an absolute shitshow

I'd say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.

[-] gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 points 2 days ago

No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release and definitely it should not have a break in something basic just because the language used to write the command break backword compatibilty

[-] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release

Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), and Donny Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi) in the 3rd bowling alley scene in The Big Lebowski (1998), with subtitle "Year? Well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man."

This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.

Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?

Ubuntu hasn't even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases' schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes...)

[-] zstg@programming.dev 46 points 4 days ago

The project hasn't had a stable release, and yes, it does certainly need more testing to uncover edge cases.

Yes, MIT bad, but one must not diss on the project just because it has been written in Rust.

[-] wewbull@feddit.uk 38 points 4 days ago

The problem isn't the language. It's the cargo cult that surrounds it.

[-] PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 31 points 3 days ago

I see what you did there

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[-] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 22 points 4 days ago

People will blame Rust for the incompetence of Ubuntu team to adopt the uutils as default prematurely.

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[-] mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 4 days ago

When i'm in the most unnecessary competition and my opponent is rust coreutils:

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[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 19 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Im so happy work stopped using ubuntu server after last time.

Also how the heck do you break cp of all things.

I dont want to experiment with core utils.

[-] a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Give me 10 minutes and I'll write you a cp that is completely fucked.

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[-] iByteABit@lemmy.ml 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

cp of all things

cp might sound simple because its a very necessary thing for an OS to do, but there's quite some technical depth to each of the core utils, if it were simple people would just be pumping out coreutil practice projects just like they do with "generic CRUD web app 5000"

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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
128 points (100.0% liked)

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