Subj : Re: macOS 26
To   : apam
From : tenser
Date : Mon Nov 24 2025 02:54 am

On 01 Nov 2025 at 05:43a, apam pondered and said...
 
 ap> And so much of this complexity and newness just seems to me to be new for
 ap> the sake of being new. Ubuntu using rust coreutils for example ... why?
 ap> The existing core utils have been worked on for many years and work well,
 ap> but rust is the new shiny and we have to port to that to be safe - so
 ap> there's now a bunch of issues with compatibility with new core utils,
 ap> which will be worked out eventually, but for what?

I can speak to this a little bit.  Two reasons that I see
initially include a) code quality and maintainability issues
with GNU coreutils, and b) the GNU license.  uutils is much
better code generally (unit tests!!), and certainly easier to
maintain, the project uses modern development practices with
respect to review, CI, and so on.  And the MIT license makes
it much easier to integrate with other projects.

The issue with compatibility is real, but I would argue that
in some ways this is good: there are already alternative user
space implementations of the POSIX and Unix utilities (the
BSDs, System V, various commercial Unixes that still exist,
and so on).  Having diversity in this area forces downstream
projects to be a bit cleaner and more disciplined.

As for ubuntu switching to uutils?  Meh, I'm ambivalent, but
that's largely because I think that Canonical is run by a loon.

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