Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

omgubuntu.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 341 posts

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#291

Post by 1718627440 »

atoav wrote: post #168

I would be very curious about a bit more concrete and substential criticism what is bad (or good) about how the both versions, that goes beyond general arguments like: Just because it is Rust, it is not safe! It worked before, don't replace it! etc. Not that these are not valid points of criticism, but in my opinion if we have two core utils we can (and should) pick the better one after careful continous evaluation.…

> we can (and should) pick the better one after careful continous evaluation

The current complaint is that they pick the worse one after at the current evaluation.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#292

Post by LtWorf »

throw0101a wrote: post #228
LtWorf wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the first issue with uutils. Canonical is just rushing the switch because they want to get rid of software with GPLv3 license, not because there is any technical merit for doing so.

If they want the default to be non-GPLv3 Rust-based that's fine, but some of us don't care ( and want the same behaviour everywhere, like on RH-based systems we may also have) and they should leave the GNU as an option. Potentially both could be installed at the same time (it's what update-alternatives is for after all).

That would work, but they also don't want everybody to switch to the better alternative and nullify their effort.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#293

Post by LtWorf »

IlikeMadison wrote: post #180
LtWorf wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ubuntu wants to kill desktop linux. No other explaination of why they push firefox inside snap, which then proceeds to constantly crash, when firefox used normally works completely fine. I haven't tried chromium but I presume it's the same issue. At work I'm forced to use ubuntu and I placed snapd on hold and added mozilla's own apt repository to my configuration to get firefox. At least in the past few month…

sandboxing a browser makes total sense. my firefox and chromium running as snaps never crashed a single time for as long as I can remember, and I use both every day, at the same time.

I sandbox with firejail. There is no reason to use snaps. Also in firejail I never experienced a crash.

> never crashed a single time

I'm very happy for you. How does that help the people who do encounter issues?

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#294

Post by dale_glass »

dijit wrote: post #259
dale_glass wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we still using dd? Seriously, it's a weird obtuse command. Weird syntax that doesn't match anything else, and the block size shouldn't be needed 99% of the time. A modern tool should figure out a good value on its own, either by interrogating the devices at both ends, or by benchmarking, or both.

I don’t know of a better tool that operates on raw blocks, maybe there is one. `dd` is a real power user command, I’d prefer that it isn’t doing “intelligent” things, especially not by default.

How about bmaptool? It can work on sparse images.

In general, I don't see the point in manually specifying block sizes most of the time. What I want nearly always the maximum performance, and that should be possible to derive from the hardware, and/or benchmarking.

What about uses like say, skipping data? seek= and skip= are in block sizes, that may not be ideal for performance.

A smart tool should be able to write in 1 MB blocks and yet still skip 512 bytes.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#295

Post by zamadatix »

collinfunk wrote: post #175
tcfhgj wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't threads been one of the reason some core util got faster?

Only GNU sort uses threads. There is still some room for improvement there, if anyone wants to take a shot at it. :)

I think I saw the Rust based implementations sometimes used a separate thread for background tasks like statistics reporting. Not much additional in the way of "directly" using threads, but I wonder how many could actually be any faster with direct threading.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#296

Post by akdev1l »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #278
akdev1l wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cp file.iso /dev/sda

This isn't portable though, it's a GNU-specific "smart" things. Elsewhere, this overwrites the target device file.

How exactly is cp not portable?

Whatever behaviour you’re describing is not how POSIX mandates cp to work. In fact you can do this with busybox too.

cp will open("/dev/sda", O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC) and simply start writing to that file descriptor.

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#297

Post by rurban »

overfeed wrote: post #167
dsign wrote: post #101

Hmm, this doesn’t make sense. You simply don’t replace utilities with many decades of maturity and that “just work” with something that is not as mature. It will open all users of the distro to all sorts of subtle and not so subtle bugs. I for one don’t want to find myself staring at a mysterious segfault when I want to build the latest version of nodejs or flash a microcontroller. It’s such a pity; I have used Ubunt…

on the other hand, Rust is memory safe!

Almost, but not really

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#298

Post by [deleted] »

akdev1l wrote: post #296
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't portable though, it's a GNU-specific "smart" things. Elsewhere, this overwrites the target device file.

How exactly is cp not portable? Whatever behaviour you’re describing is not how POSIX mandates cp to work. In fact you can do this with busybox too. cp will open("/dev/sda", O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC) and simply start writing to that file descriptor.

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#299

Post by LtWorf »

LtWorf wrote: post #222
PunchyHamster wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My nvidia GPU worked just fine. Debian has non-free repo you know...

Nowadays the non-free-firmware repo is active by default, so the normal official debian image actually works. It used to be the case that the normal download from the homepage was often useless because it didn't support most networking hardware, but this is no longer the case now.

Got to love this website :D Downvoted for completely true information with no ideological spin :D :D :D

Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

#300

Post by pjmlp »

1718627440 wrote: post #287
pjmlp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses. There is a reason all FOSS OS alternatives for embedded systems like Zephyr, NuttX, FreeRTOS, IDF, Arduino,... are not GPL based, while Google has purged Android and ChromeOS from it, with the Linux kernel being the only GPL piece left.

> Arduino,... are not GPL based Arduino is "just" repacked gcc in a nutshell, so it is GPL-based.

You need more than a compiler, so it is complicated, and not pure GPL,

https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...

Post reply on HN