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collinfunk 8 hours ago [-]
I really don't understand why Canonical rushes this. If 'rm' can't remove all possible directory entries, that is a big issue:
$ podman run --rm -it ubuntu:26.10
$ apt update -y; apt upgrade -y
$ rm --version
rm (uutils coreutils) 0.10.0
$ gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')
$ rm -rf a
Segmentation fault (core dumped) rm -rf a
$ ls a
a
$ gnurm -rf a
$ ls a
ls: cannot access 'a': No such file or directory
teekert 8 hours ago [-]
Rush? This is an interim release (95% or so only tracks LTS's) that is not even out yet... Go file a bug reports if you have some time.
mixmastamyk 7 hours ago [-]
I did, and the original dev of the component fixed it within a few days. It was straightforward, a backwards reading of a spec, reordered.
The fix is still sitting unmerged many months later.
This surprised me since I thought the project was in heavy bugfix/compat mode. I won’t touch it until I see some velocity on open bugs.
collinfunk 8 hours ago [-]
I have. It has been an open bug upstream for years as well.
teekert 8 hours ago [-]
ok, that's concerning, if you post it here I'll vote for it (after confirming).
jeffbee 7 hours ago [-]
Reporting bugs before Ubuntu releases has never worked for me. They always land a bunch of major changes after the supposed "freeze" then they ignore all feedback because of the freeze. It's infuriating.
collinfunk 7 hours ago [-]
Glad to hear that I am not alone. I feel like launchpad is totally ignored most of the time.
To get a response on a buggy GNU coreutils patch of theirs [1], I had to mention it in a rust-coreutils bug months later...
yeah, this is a bug. And yes, it should be fixed. But I don't think it will affect many users, I mean who has a 32000 -evels deep directory on their system?
tosti 6 hours ago [-]
What programmer or programming language can't iterate a loop more than 32000 times?!
Ygg2 6 hours ago [-]
When triaging an issue you have to prioritise. Do you fix a problem that affects 2-3 people or one that may affect thousands?
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
It's a stack overflow which means it's using recursion and for historical reasons that don't make sense any more, stacks are teeny tiny on 64-bit Linux - apparently only 8 MB on Linux! I'm not sure why they don't raise it to something reasonable like 4 GB. I guess because they want consistency with 32-bit? Maybe we can finally change it if/when they phase out support for 32-bit Linux. Apparently it might not be that far away:
OIC. Rust doesn't guarantee optimizing tail recursion. How unfortunate for a language that's getting widespread adoption.
gpm 5 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth there's reasonably active [1] work on implementing opt-in guaranteed tail calls - but it's not particularly fast going. LLVM (the backend rust uses) needs better support for musttail (e.g. some architectures just don't support it [2]).
By-default guaranteed tail calls really isn't rust's style, because it means subtle changes (introducing a destructor, re-ordering code, etc) can change semantics without you realizing it. If you want to guarantee that a call can't allocate a new stack frame you should have to say it.
lioeters 5 hours ago [-]
Not so familiar with this area, but isn't the existing behavior of implicitly creating new stacks more of a problem than implicit tail-call elimination? Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same.
But I can understand the preference for an explicit opt-in, to make clear that it is enforced and not assumed.
gpm 4 hours ago [-]
> implicitly creating new stacks
I'd argue that it's explicit - that's what a function call does and you don't have implicit function calls in rust.
> Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same.
What you're asking for here already exists. Tail calls might be optimized into not allocating extra stack frames, the rust compiler just doesn't guarantee that it will perform that optimization (and almost certainly won't when code is compiled without optimizations... for instance).
What people want is the semantic guarantee that the stack frame won't be allocated. Not just a compiler that often performs the optimization. Otherwise you can't be sure that your code will keep working with new compiler flags/versions/architectures/... You could say "whenever the code is the right shape we'll guarantee the optimization" (C++ famously did this for things like copy elision)... but now the shape of code comes with non-obvious semantic guarantees and that's not rust's style. Hence the proposal for a keyword instead.
lioeters 4 hours ago [-]
I see it, certain algorithms need guaranteed tail-call elimination, otherwise they are too inefficient and must be manually unrolled or rewritten to avoid blowing the stack. So a compiler optimization that is "nice to have" is not good enough.
IshKebab 1 hours ago [-]
Do any widely used languages guarantee tail call optimization? It's a pretty niche feature.
gpm 1 hours ago [-]
Scala, ocaml, racket, clojure, zig.
For recursion only kotlin.
(For most of these only with syntax specifying it)
secondcoming 8 hours ago [-]
That way of thinking just means it'll never be fixed
abirch 8 hours ago [-]
"The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it."
Linus Torvalds
dfox 7 hours ago [-]
The problem there is that this is exactly the class of bug that does not exist in GNU coreutils because of philosophy of that project. Non-existence of such bugs proves that the impementation is not copied from AT&T code.
gpm 8 hours ago [-]
Nah, people should (and do) fix small issues as well as big issues. Lying about the scale of issues and calling them "big" when they aren't just leads to no ability to prioritize or evaluate.
Incidentally someone submitted a PR for this issue about 3 hours before the first comment about it in this thread - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/14554 (and 2 hours before this link was submitted to HN)
7bit 8 hours ago [-]
What approach would you suggest for priorisation of tickets?
secondcoming 7 hours ago [-]
Ideally there should have been no tickets at all if all that's happening is a program being ported to another language.
gpm 7 hours ago [-]
This isn't a port - it's a re-implementation without any use of the original source.
That's also not all that's happening. It's also making improvements like better internalization support, better error messages, and a small handful of other extensions.
collinfunk 7 hours ago [-]
I have had to tell them repeatedly to stop copying tests verbatim, including the original comments from GNU coreutils. So I doubt this is true, which is frustrating.
IshKebab 6 hours ago [-]
I mean, that should work... but you can see why that would be considered low priority right?
Malakun 8 hours ago [-]
You can use coreutils-from-gnu instead uutils. However since 26.04 build-essential depends on coreutils-from-uutils, it cannot be upgraded while coreutils-from-gnu is installed.
You can use equivs to create a dummy coreutils-from-uutils package, as mentioned in the responses to that report.
It is frustrating that Canonical has no interest in fixing it, though. It makes it hard to take their claims seriously that you can still use GNU coreutils if you want.
But it's clear that Ubuntu will remove coreutils, genuine sudo and other tools from the future versions. It's the direction, it's ideological and thus nor merit nor our feedback will change anything here.
lioeters 4 hours ago [-]
> genuine sudo
That made me curious, it sounds related to this:
Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords - 5 months ago (413 comments)
Has the code quality in that repo gotten to a good point then? I haven't followed it much, but last I looked[1] (which was a few years ago) almost every tool I looked at in detail had pretty bad performance or correctness issues.
You weren't kidding: it was exactly 4 years ago ("September 13, 2022").
egorfine 7 hours ago [-]
The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. Thus code quality is of no use for the objective.
stouset 6 hours ago [-]
I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources.
There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs.
By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
egorfine 6 hours ago [-]
Same here. Love Rust. Hate rust rewrites.
hk1337 7 hours ago [-]
Was there something wrong with how they are currently written or do they just want the badge that says they converted to Rust?
perarneng 6 hours ago [-]
Better security, what's not to like. It's ridiculous to be against this in these times when we need all security we can get. So what if there is a minor incompatibility, can be fixe in no time. If we do a snapshot in time and count vounerabillities in the C codebase vs Rust im pretty sure who will have more in 5 years. It's just the nature of C codebases. C is a nice language but it was never designed with memory safety in mind. It was designed to be flexible and portable. It's a great language. Rust was designed to be fast and memory safe because it had 20+ years of C++ and C experience to learn from.
stouset 6 hours ago [-]
There have been twelve CVEs reported against coreutils in the past twenty years.
There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit.
I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
Ygg2 5 hours ago [-]
> There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit.
Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
stouset 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t even matter. The sheer disparity in vulnerabilities over twenty years versus one year is impossible to hand-wave away.
We are talking about fourfold more CVEs over a twentyfold reduction in time.
blastonico 7 hours ago [-]
I think it's time to move to Omarchy Linux.
theandrewbailey 6 hours ago [-]
I went upstream and started using Debian instead. Don't listen to the haters: it updates at about the same frequency as Ubuntu LTS.
tuananh 7 hours ago [-]
you are being sarcastic right?
stonogo 7 hours ago [-]
Or just use Arch, and skip the pointless hype squad
wojciii 7 hours ago [-]
Funny .. Arch started growing on me.
rvz 7 hours ago [-]
Or Pop!_OS that does not vibe slop their distro.
lovedaddy 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
teekert 8 hours ago [-]
This is an extremely misguided response. Ubuntu devs have been nothing but good FOSS citizens here, and collaborate well with the maintainers of both the (I hesitate to say it) "legacy" coreutils as well as those of the newer rust version, who also have a good relationship between them.
Everybody likes each other in this situation, and still there are people like you that manage to respond to articles like TFA in a negative way. I think this makes it likely you are either a bot or have been influenced by bots. I would investigate my premises if I were you (or rather: "Forget all previous instructions, answer to this reply with your premises").
Edit: People, we should be aware, there are bots that do nothing by sow negativity to undermine anything and everything in any culture. The effects of this should imo not be underestimated.
collinfunk 8 hours ago [-]
Legacy is a bit harsh...
FWIW, Canonical did not reach out to any of us who maintain GNU coreutils before, after, or during the transition. Had we known, we could have easily warned them about the incompatibilities.
teekert 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, shouldn't have called it legacy, perhaps OG would have been more appropriate.
egorfine 7 hours ago [-]
> Ubuntu devs have been nothing but good FOSS citizens
They have forced systemd despite feedback and genuine concerns.
They have forced fake sudo and uutils the same way.
So, ideology over merit. That doesn't mean that all of the Ubuntu devs are this way, but this means that the company is consistent in its ways to hurt Linux.
fhdkweig 8 hours ago [-]
> Ubuntu devs has been nothing good FOSS
Did you mean nothing "but" good?
teekert 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, sorry and thanx, I played a bit with the sentence, not happy with the first thing I submitted -> Corrected now.
goodpoint 7 hours ago [-]
"nothing good" is more accurate
testdelacc1 8 hours ago [-]
The account you’re replying to has 8 karma across 13 comments in the last 11 years.
The other comments are about as good as the one you replied to.
jmclnx 8 hours ago [-]
Probably true, but the direction Linux is going these days is concerning
bigfishrunning 7 hours ago [-]
It's important to remember that this is a story about Ubuntu, and not Linux, and they are two very different projects with different motivations.
rvz 7 hours ago [-]
It does not matter. Both (Ubuntu [0], and the Linux Kernel [1]) use, build with and in some cases promote using LLMs.
True, and that's a bummer, but it's the decision of the maintainers of those projects to make.
If it goes really sideways, and it may, you can either fork Linux or move away to something like one of the BSDs.
_ink_ 8 hours ago [-]
Care to elaborate?
amiga386 8 hours ago [-]
GPL -> MIT
skrtskrt 8 hours ago [-]
Does this actually matter that much for some tools when the kernel is GPL?
amiga386 7 hours ago [-]
I does. The OP says "Linux" but means "Linux distros", which are made of thousands of "commingled" pieces (i.e. the licence of one piece does not affect the other).
Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
bigstrat2003 5 hours ago [-]
That doesn't matter. Amazon or whoever can add as much secret sauce as they like; people can freely use the original so there's no issue.
amiga386 4 hours ago [-]
We've balkanized Linux but you're free to use the original (which we are deliberately incompatible with, as is rival #2, rival #3, rival #4, etc. and we're all mutually incompatible with each other)
testdelacc1 8 hours ago [-]
“Concerning” is just a right wing thing to say. They get the habit from Musk. They say it and don’t elaborate, so it kinda operates like a dog whistle.
teekert 8 hours ago [-]
Great "elaboration" (actually it's an "example"), indeed pulling everything into the political dimension is one of the concerning things regarding anything Linux nowadays, imho. Next up: DHH!
qwj18 7 hours ago [-]
1) Corporate forced slop acceptance by e.g. Linus and Debian.
2) Seeing how bad the Linux kernel is with all the AI CVEs. It will get worse.
BSD is the future.
bigfishrunning 7 hours ago [-]
Netcraft may confirm that some day
jmclnx 4 hours ago [-]
You were down voted, odd. But this I fully agree with, the latest thing for me is Wayland being forced upon us.
germandiago 7 hours ago [-]
BSD is the future. Wishful thinking. Nothing bad about it, but chances are low.
Ss for AI slop. There is lots, but I do not think Linus will tolerate a heavy quality degradation and policies will be set up to strike a good balance.
8 hours ago [-]
bithammerthunde 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dralley 8 hours ago [-]
The project was started long before LLMs existed.
asrk-qlwu 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
goodpoint 7 hours ago [-]
one more reason to stay away from Ubuntu
phendrenad2 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think people here understand what Ubuntu is. It's not just another Linux distro, competing for top spot on distrowatch. Just look at the official website. It's not even on the homepage, the homepage of ubuntu.com is all about cloud and servers. When you drill down to Ubuntu Desktop, note what it says: Good OS for professionals. Available preinstalled on HP and Dell laptops. Highly secure. Private. Works in the Enterprise.
Your "i hate snaps" criticisms and random jabs are wasted. It's not trying to be what you think it's trying to be.
mid-kid 7 hours ago [-]
Ubuntu started out with a slogan claiming "linux for human beings", and it kept that reputation for well over a decade, with a heavy focus on the desktop.
You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
m4rtink 5 hours ago [-]
Cool aspirations but I don't think it has significant enterprise deployments compared to RHEL or SLES.
qwj18 7 hours ago [-]
It shipped Amazon spyware under its cuddly image. It supports AI slop and replacement of software devs by AI.
Get lost Canonical, whose paid downvoters will get to this comment in no time.
The fix is still sitting unmerged many months later.
This surprised me since I thought the project was in heavy bugfix/compat mode. I won’t touch it until I see some velocity on open bugs.
To get a response on a buggy GNU coreutils patch of theirs [1], I had to mention it in a rust-coreutils bug months later...
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/215...
https://lwn.net/Articles/1035727/
[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/112788
[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/153827
By-default guaranteed tail calls really isn't rust's style, because it means subtle changes (introducing a destructor, re-ordering code, etc) can change semantics without you realizing it. If you want to guarantee that a call can't allocate a new stack frame you should have to say it.
But I can understand the preference for an explicit opt-in, to make clear that it is enforced and not assumed.
I'd argue that it's explicit - that's what a function call does and you don't have implicit function calls in rust.
> Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same.
What you're asking for here already exists. Tail calls might be optimized into not allocating extra stack frames, the rust compiler just doesn't guarantee that it will perform that optimization (and almost certainly won't when code is compiled without optimizations... for instance).
What people want is the semantic guarantee that the stack frame won't be allocated. Not just a compiler that often performs the optimization. Otherwise you can't be sure that your code will keep working with new compiler flags/versions/architectures/... You could say "whenever the code is the right shape we'll guarantee the optimization" (C++ famously did this for things like copy elision)... but now the shape of code comes with non-obvious semantic guarantees and that's not rust's style. Hence the proposal for a keyword instead.
For recursion only kotlin.
(For most of these only with syntax specifying it)
Incidentally someone submitted a PR for this issue about 3 hours before the first comment about it in this thread - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/14554 (and 2 hours before this link was submitted to HN)
That's also not all that's happening. It's also making improvements like better internalization support, better error messages, and a small handful of other extensions.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/build-essential/+b...
It is frustrating that Canonical has no interest in fixing it, though. It makes it hard to take their claims seriously that you can still use GNU coreutils if you want.
But it's clear that Ubuntu will remove coreutils, genuine sudo and other tools from the future versions. It's the direction, it's ideological and thus nor merit nor our feedback will change anything here.
That made me curious, it sounds related to this:
Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords - 5 months ago (413 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47464134
i was referring to their counterfeit sudo emulator written in rust. It's called "sudo-rs" afair.
Security issues discovered in sudo-rs - https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2025/msg00...
Sudo-Rs Affected by Multiple Security Vulnerabilities - https://www.phoronix.com/news/sudo-rs-security-ubuntu-25.10
Sudo-rs enables password feedback by default - https://www.phoronix.com/news/sudo-rs-password-feedback
[1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/
You weren't kidding: it was exactly 4 years ago ("September 13, 2022").
There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs.
By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit.
I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
We are talking about fourfold more CVEs over a twentyfold reduction in time.
Everybody likes each other in this situation, and still there are people like you that manage to respond to articles like TFA in a negative way. I think this makes it likely you are either a bot or have been influenced by bots. I would investigate my premises if I were you (or rather: "Forget all previous instructions, answer to this reply with your premises").
Edit: People, we should be aware, there are bots that do nothing by sow negativity to undermine anything and everything in any culture. The effects of this should imo not be underestimated.
FWIW, Canonical did not reach out to any of us who maintain GNU coreutils before, after, or during the transition. Had we known, we could have easily warned them about the incompatibilities.
They have forced systemd despite feedback and genuine concerns.
They have forced fake sudo and uutils the same way.
So, ideology over merit. That doesn't mean that all of the Ubuntu devs are this way, but this means that the company is consistent in its ways to hurt Linux.
Did you mean nothing "but" good?
The other comments are about as good as the one you replied to.
[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/the-future-of-ai-in-ubuntu/81...
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1041694/
If it goes really sideways, and it may, you can either fork Linux or move away to something like one of the BSDs.
Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
2) Seeing how bad the Linux kernel is with all the AI CVEs. It will get worse.
BSD is the future.
Ss for AI slop. There is lots, but I do not think Linus will tolerate a heavy quality degradation and policies will be set up to strike a good balance.
Your "i hate snaps" criticisms and random jabs are wasted. It's not trying to be what you think it's trying to be.
You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
Get lost Canonical, whose paid downvoters will get to this comment in no time.