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What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

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Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#201

Post by einr »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #199
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

Sure, but util-linux and the BSDs won't suddenly cease to exist. If you don't like what Ubuntu is doing, just don't use it. Upstream debian has been much more stable for as long as Ubuntu has existed...

Sure, but util-linux and the BSDs won't suddenly cease to exist. If you don't like what Ubuntu is doing, just don't use it.

And then websites and applications stop working if you're not using a verified, attested, locked-down OS and you're stuck with your nice free software system that will not do your online banking, let you chat with your friends, or access your company resources.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#202

Post by davemp »

josephg wrote: post #61
nekiwo wrote: post #33

Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...

What evil deeds are you worried about in particular? What are you afraid people will do now that coreutils is MIT?

Does it even need to be explicitly stated? Closed linux userlands.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#203

Post by einr »

benrutter wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

History probably says I'm being naive, but I feel like I don't hate this possibility (hear me out!). Personally, I'd always choose to use a distribution with open source userland packages and utils, but if closed source alternatives exist and conform to the same specifications (i.e. we get "embrace" without the "extend and extinguish") then I don't mind if a company has closed sourced tech, especially if it'll help t…

i.e. we get "embrace" without the "extend and extinguish"

This only ever happens when the party trying to EEE is fighting a losing battle. If they have the upper hand, they will always get to the extend and extinguish part. Do we think movements for user freedom have the upper hand right now?

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#204

Post by jacquesm »

petcat wrote: post #8
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #2

I've been a fan of all rust-based utilities that I've used. I am worried that 20+ (??) years of bug fixes and edge-case improvements can't be accounted for by simply using a newer/better code-base. A lot of bug fixes/exploits are _CAUSED_ by the C+ core, but still... Tried & true vs new hotness?

Is Rust still considered "new hotness"? I feel like the industry has long-since moved past that perceived "blocker". It seems like Rust is now just the default in all manner of critical systems.

No, it's Node.js. I kid you not. I keep coming across Node in places where I really would not expect it.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#205

Post by KronisLV »

bayindirh wrote: post #183
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, no one should be using Ubuntu. They are the free CD people from the 2000s. They are the Apple of Linux, marketing wins, but low quality. They used outdated linux (Debian-family) because its lower cost to maintain. All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch)

> They used outdated linux (Debian-family) because its lower cost to maintain. Ubuntu forks Sid, and evolves from there. They don't downstream Debian Stable. > All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future. Maybe OpenSUSE too. (Note these are not Arch or related to Arch) Daily driving Debian stable on servers and Testing on desktops for more than two decades. Testing is a rolling distribut…

>> All around, never use debian-family outside servers. Fedora is the future.

That take in of itself also feels... uncommon?

My experience matches yours more or less, I've run both Debian (and their LTS project version at one point) and Ubuntu LTS on my servers, both have been generally okay, albeit with a snag or two along the way.

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-and-grub-are-broken

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/debian-updates-are-broken

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ubuntu-lts-is-broken

Aside from a few cases of not-very-serious configurations with off the shelf hardware having issues that I get to write the occasional rant about (back when I had an "Everything is broken" section in my blog), it's been surprisingly stable otherwise.

I've had far more issues with RHEL-compatible distros (hate that they killed CentOS, Oracle Linux is sometimes weird but kinda works, outside of work stuff I'd personally reach for Rocky Linux which is a nicer experience) both when it comes to running stuff like Docker (way before Podman was even stable, RHEL-compatibles didn't play nicely with Docker when it came to SELinux and networking) and also support for slightly more uncommon consumer hardware, like my netbook touchpad didn't work at all by default on Fedora, but did work on DEB distros.

The 10 year EOL is really nice, though, and if they had something as nice as Proxmox (for free), I'd probably be using RPM distros for my hypervisors right now!

That's also kind of why I think saying that either of those don't have much of a future would be an odd statement - in my experience, both have their occasional issues but are still generally good for desktop and server use cases.

As an addendum, however, snaps suck, viva la Linux Mint for desktop, plus, Cinnamon is a nice desktop and it's still close enough to Ubuntu LTS I run on servers if I ever need that familiarity in regards to packages!

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#206

Post by ninkendo »

jabl wrote: post #147
ninkendo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think GP is moving the goalposts at all, rather I think a lot of people are willfully misrepresenting GP’s point. Rust-to-rust code should be able to be dynamically linked with an ABI that has better safety guarantees than the C ABI. That’s the point. You can’t even express an Option via the C ABI, let alone the myriad of other things rust has that are put together to make it a safe language. You can look to…

> You can look to Swift for prior art on how this can be done: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/ > It would be very hard to accomplish. Since Rust cares very much about zero-overhead abstractions and performance, I would guess if something like this were to be implemented, it would have to be via some optional (crate/module/function?) attributes, and the default would remain the existing monomorphization style of…

Swift’s approach still monomorphizes within a binary, and only has runtime costs when calling code across a dylib boundary. I think rust could do something like this as well.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#207

Post by bayindirh »

IshKebab wrote: post #196
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

> Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Can we stop this conspiracy nonsense? They have explicitly stated that licensing was not a motivation, and even if you think they're lying it wouldn't make any sense anyway! No Tivoization is foiled by Coreutils being GPL. That's ridiculous for so many reasons, not least you can j…

> Can we stop this conspiracy nonsense?

If they can earn my trust, why not? I'm not a pointlessly stubborn person. I have changed my views in the past, and can certainly change in the future. This my view resulting from my experiences, and jury is still out from my perspective. If you want to trust Canonical and Co., you can. Don't let me stop you.

> They have explicitly stated that licensing was not a motivation, and even if you think they're lying it wouldn't make any sense anyway!

Who prevents forking Ubuntu and taking that extra mile, esp. now we have a company which wants to enable exactly that lockdown?

> No Tivoization is foiled by Coreutils being GPL.

Belts have holes. They can be used to hold or to choke. Adding more holes to a belt allows more different uses.

> That's ridiculous for so many reasons,

Can you give me more reasons to believe me that I'm a tinfoil wearing crazy weirdo?

> not least you can just use the BSD versions, as Apple does (and they still release the source code!).

Same Apple removing any GPLv3 (and possibly GPLv2) tool from their roster in every iteration from their OS. Same Apple which provides no way to verify that what's published is what's running on their hardware. Same Apple which provides SIP to seal their system partitions which can't be modified without breaking tons of guarantees and seals. Same Apple which controls from their processor to software, without any gaps.

Having the source have no meaning there. You can't use that source. You can't modify the machine you use, you can't install any other OS or just test something.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#208

Post by ninkendo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #169
ninkendo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think GP is moving the goalposts at all, rather I think a lot of people are willfully misrepresenting GP’s point. Rust-to-rust code should be able to be dynamically linked with an ABI that has better safety guarantees than the C ABI. That’s the point. You can’t even express an Option via the C ABI, let alone the myriad of other things rust has that are put together to make it a safe language. You can look to…

> You can’t even express an Option via the C ABI But you can express Option for a concrete Foo. Do you really need any more than that?

> But you can express Option for a concrete Foo

I don’t think that’s true?

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/option-is-ffi-safe-or-not/2982...

You could maybe say that a pointer can be transmuted to an Option because there’s an Option-specific optimization that an Option uses null as the None value, but that’s not always guaranteed. And it doesn’t apply to non-references, for instance Option’s None value would be indistinguishable from false. You could get lucky if you launder your Option through repr(C) and the compiler versions match and don’t mangle the internal representation, but there’s no guarantees here, since the ABI isn’t stable. (You even get a warning if you try to put a struct in your function signatures that doesn’t have a stable repr(C).)

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#209

Post by bayindirh »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #199
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Also, Ubuntu using a non-GPL licensed userland means they can pull all kinds of tricks to allow more TiVoization in the Linux ecosystem. Combine this with what Amutable (systemd guys) are building, and you can have monolithic, closed source, non-user-modifiable Linux distributions or flavors. Ubuntu and companies which embed Linux into their products will love this from a business perspective. Consider: An end to end…

Sure, but util-linux and the BSDs won't suddenly cease to exist. If you don't like what Ubuntu is doing, just don't use it. Upstream debian has been much more stable for as long as Ubuntu has existed...

I don't use Ubuntu anywhere, so there's no actions I need to take.

> Upstream debian has been much more stable for as long as Ubuntu has existed...

Well, I use Debian before Ubuntu has existed, and it was never unstable to begin with. I understand the value of more eyes looking into something and its advantages, but let's say, Ubuntu has acted with selfish reasons towards Debian in some cases. I personally taken side in one of these debates, even.

Yes, I follow debian-devel, and even leaded a Debian derivative distro for some time.

Re: What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust

#210

Post by tcfhgj »

bayindirh wrote: post #193
lelanthran wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's the chasm I want to see Rust cross: That's not important. What I want to see is the Rewrite-it-in-Rust movement move towards GPL. GPL is pro-user. MIT is pro-business. In their zeal to convert, they are happily replacing pro-user software with pro-business software. Their primary goal is to convert, not to safeguard. If they shifted their goal from spreading Rust to protecting users, I'd be a lot happier abo…

> In their zeal to convert, they are happily replacing pro-user software with pro-business software. This is one of the two main reasons I'm not using Rust. Second reason is being addressed by gccrs team, so I have no big gripes there, since they are progressing well.

I think this makes you implicitly are a part of this trend, because even less pro user software exists in Rust because of your decision
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