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Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

joshmcguigan.com

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Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#111

Post by nicman23 »

timschmidt wrote: post #98
nicman23 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean that is ok but i do not want them using open source commons without any contribution. it is not a logic thing. i just hate oss being basically abused in that way

I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well. Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And a…

again you are correct i just do not like it :P

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#112

Post by lelanthran »

timschmidt wrote: post #110
lelanthran wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software. Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very co…

> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software. Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history an…

> It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable.

That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide.

I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#113

Post by timschmidt »

nicman23 wrote: post #111
timschmidt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well. Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And a…

again you are correct i just do not like it :P

I get it. I am really excited about the current state of open source FPGA tooling, along with newly inexpensive and capable FPGAs as well as new low cost foundry shuttle services. Also the massive productivity boost LLMs provide. Feels like I have the world's most capable army of software development interns for $20/mo.

Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. And we even have reasonable platforms for developing open source phone stacks like Pinephone - I remember the bad old days of OpenMoko.

I think proprietary chips and boards are about to go the way of proprietary *nix. It'll take a decade or more, and lots of work. But the future's never looked brighter for open systems.

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#114

Post by timschmidt »

lelanthran wrote: post #112
timschmidt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software. Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history an…

> It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide. I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.

> That's a strawman

Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of? Seems to imply force either through legal or practical means.

> the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses

I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed. I benefit from both, as do you, as does the whole world.

I bet proprietary software vendors get a real chuckle out of this sort of infighting.

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#115

Post by nicman23 »

timschmidt wrote: post #113
nicman23 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again you are correct i just do not like it :P

I get it. I am really excited about the current state of open source FPGA tooling, along with newly inexpensive and capable FPGAs as well as new low cost foundry shuttle services. Also the massive productivity boost LLMs provide. Feels like I have the world's most capable army of software development interns for $20/mo. Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. An…

the issue i think is not the design but more the fabs. there are too many designs and not enough sub 10nm fabs

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#116

Post by timschmidt »

nicman23 wrote: post #115
timschmidt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it. I am really excited about the current state of open source FPGA tooling, along with newly inexpensive and capable FPGAs as well as new low cost foundry shuttle services. Also the massive productivity boost LLMs provide. Feels like I have the world's most capable army of software development interns for $20/mo. Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. An…

the issue i think is not the design but more the fabs. there are too many designs and not enough sub 10nm fabs

There will always be a premium on latest node fabs. Nothing to be done about that without billions of dollars to invest, which comes with it's own strings. In time sub-10nm fabs will be older and less expensive as newer nodes come online.

I don't need the fastest or lowest power devices though. I'd happily trade some of each for a more flexible future-proof machine. I just need an FPGA big enough to hold a linux-capable core or two, with graphics and audio and networking at an affordable price. Bonus points if it has some extra space for developing new peripherals.

I think it'd be pretty easy to design something to conform to the raspberry pi compute module interface, for example, which would make it a drop-in replacement for lots of useful systems like laptops, NUCs, and other such stuff. Gotta love defacto standard interfaces.

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#117

Post by DEADMINCE »

DeathArrow wrote: post #92
lelanthran wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's arguable that macOS going Unix had a halo effect that did more for Linux and open source than if they stayed on a completely propietary stack. But that's not relevant to the parent's point, which is "If all open source, such as Linux, was BSD licensed, then only proprietary unixes would be common", which I happen to agree with. Linux would have been further behind because all the proprietary unixes could take…

>and all those thousands of full-time employees working on Linux would have created value for the shareholders of their employers, not value for the Linux users (like they currently do now) But aren't the biggest Linux users companies? They use Linux for their data centers, for the mobile phones they sell.

That is basically irrelevant to the point that was made though.

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#118

Post by JoshMcguigan »

M95D wrote: post #48

> Instead of modifying all the packages that depend on GNU coreutils (known as the package sys-apps/coreutils in Gentoo), I modified the GNU coreutils package to instead install uutils coreutils. That's not the way to do it (in Gentoo). He should have added coreutils to /etc/portage/profile/package.provided. Portage would then assume the package is installed even if it's not. This is used to install self-built binari…

Thanks for pointing out `package.provided`. It does look like it could be a reasonable way to do this, but I'm not sure how exactly I'd be able to atomically swap GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils using that method?

I think I'd need to add `sys-apps/coreutils` to `package.provided`, then install uutils coreutils while telling Portage to ignore file collisions (because I'd be overwriting GNU coreutils binaries). However, that would have hidden the fact that I would have also been overwriting binaries from other packages (for example `hostname`, which is provided by `sys-apps/net-tools` in Gentoo).

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#119

Post by alexvitkov »

LightFog wrote: post #17

It’s a shame to see all this effort going toward replacing core GPL licensed utilities with permissive ones. It seems like a particularly common thing in the Rust community. It feels disrespectful of the intentions of the work that went into the tools that are being cloned.

From https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html:

> If the version you've created is considerably more useful than the original, then it's worth copylefting your work, for all the same reasons we normally recommend copyleft.

Wouldn't you consider this advice disrespectful to the original authors as well? The FSF is directly telling you to take the existing project, not even your own re-implementation, and take over and GPL it.

Re: Swapping GNU coreutils for uutils coreutils on Gentoo Linux

#120

Post by JoshMcguigan »

teo_zero wrote: post #14

I think the author swapped problems #1 and #2. The first one (name clash between different packages) is triggered only if the binaries are called the same, that is after you fix the second one (binaries having uu- prefix). Problem #5 is not well explained: if /usr/bin and /usr/sbin are conflated, how could cowsay not find its templates? Paths relative to the two directories are the same. For example, if cowsay is loo…

Thanks for reading so closely and providing great feedback!

You are totally right on problems 1 and 2 being swapped.

For problem #5, you caught me taking too large a logical leap and making some assumptions there. Turns out the issue is just that cowsay special cases directories called `bin` (and thus treats directories called `sbin` differently)[0].

I just pushed an update to the post correcting both of these.

[0]: https://github.com/cowsay-org/cowsay/blob/d8c459357cc2047235...

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