What an absolute shitshow
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.
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 besst, 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
The real shitshow is it’s MIT licensing. Corporate takeover 101
Corporate takeover?
Ubuntu has always belong to a corporation.
It’s not like it’s a community project. Ubuntu has always belonged to Canonical.
How is it a takeover, if they write their own set of tools?
The gnu brained folks hate when we make our own tools.
Square that circle for us?
Have you ever publish a tool that already has a gnu counterpart? Even if you say it’s for learning or an experiment you still get hounded about it.
Why publish an experiment?
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.
I like staying up to date about open source but holy cow is there too many of these “omg they broke something in testing”. Yah, that’s the point.
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.
The problem isn’t the language. It’s the cargo cult that surrounds it.
I see what you did there
I disagree with MIT License being bad. I agree on all other fronts of your statements.
MIT is terrible if it replaces current GPL projects. Companies will always provide their spyware infested proprietary version of the exact same thing which have one or two additional features, making open source software always behind rhe propruetary counterparts. See: Chromium->Google Chrome, Aosp->any Android os vendor
Great projects have used MIT without any issues. Godot for instance, which may also be needed, I don’t know if games made by godot could be closed source if it would use gnu license for instance.
Godot didn’t replace an existing broadly used GPL game engine, so this is irrelevant.
The logic was that with a mit license companies will provide a copy of the software infected with spyware leaving the open source project behind.
Explain why that hasn’t happened to godot.
The majority of project are MIT licensed and it’s not even close.
People will blame Rust for the incompetence of Ubuntu team to adopt the uutils as default prematurely.
they broke something in testing. that’s not incompetence, that’s the whole point.
I will say the Rust stdlib seems to make TOCTOU bugs really easy to make for filesystem operations
But, yes, Ubuntu switching to a test project hurts it
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.
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”
if it were simple people would just be pumping out coreutil practice projects
you might be surprised how many results come up when you search for this sort of thing
Give me 10 minutes and I’ll write you a cp that is completely fucked.
When i’m in the most unnecessary competition and my opponent is rust coreutils:
Memory safety anyone?
GNU Coreutils have worked very well for so long so replacing it is totally pointless unless memory safety has crippled the project somehow till now.
Also I really hate that project for another reason - License
Yep. And more distros support so theres more incentive to fix any issues that have popped up. Plus theres more c devs in the world than rust.
Rust is faster and easier to develop in than C. It’s also safer.
What’s wrong with the uutils license?
Rust is web scale!
Rust is absolutely not faster or easier than C. It’s safer but that’s it.
The issue with the rust utils license is that its MIT. Which many people see as vastly inferior to GPL. This is a very big deal to people who believe in the GPL.
It is definitely easier.
Don’t try and tell me cargo is not easier than fucking around with the C/CPP build slop I’ve had to screw around with over the years.
The coreutils license is bullshit but let’s not pretend languages have not improved in 50 years.
Cargo != Rust
There is no word in which the borrow checker is easier to deal with than C.
Yeah, the only real issue I have with the “rewrite it in Rust” approach is the absolute plague of permissive licensing. It is much easier to write safe, correct code in Rust.
I think it depends on the project, when writing cp you’re not really messing around with libraries so good ol make is fine
Rust is absolutely not faster or easier than C. It’s safer but that’s it.
Depends on what you mean by “easier”. It is easier to write safe code in Rust.
Memory safe!
Not any other kind of safety.
Yes, that’s what Rust is about.
Depends on what you do, really.
Dangers of this project:
- compatibility in edge-cases
- experts of their tool vs. jokel of all
- maturity of the code
- scope creep
No, it does not depend on what I do. In Rust it is by definition easier to write safe code than in C.
GNU coreutils are a copy of Unix utils themselves.
They’re also free and open source, which unix wasn’t.
Which is against the copyright in a same way as rust rewrite is
