I had a go at making an Ubuntu package recently - and to setup a PPA for it. That was a nightmare from hell that I gave up on (from ambiguous documentation, to 100s of how-tos that don't quite work for my case to making a package build in their system). To me it seems odd that coreutils is worth footling with when other problems seem to stand out to me.
Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
271–280 of 338 posts
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Will this really make coreutils more secure? In the long run yes. Sure, many logic bugs happen in Rust programs as well, but memory safety bugs are another level of hell. At least many classes of exploits will mostly be impossible. Also, Rust program failures tend to be more predictable. For example, in C/C++, if you do out of bound writes in an array or writes in a freed memory block, the behavior is undefined. T…
new C++ STL standard makes it no more undefined.
In theory yes, but it requires enough discipline and knowledge. A language that makes it harder to write bad code still has an advantage over a language that doesn't care about bad code.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do any widely used languages guarantee tail call optimization? It's a pretty niche feature.
Scala, ocaml, racket, clojure, zig. For recursion only kotlin. (For most of these only with syntax specifying it)
How interesting. I'd seen LISP(y) implementations like Scheme guarantee tail-call since recursion is a very common technique in that language family. But I didn't know Zig supported it.
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#call
They have an @call built-in that guarantees: always/never tail, as well as always/never inline. That's neat, I can see how that would be useful in various situations.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
cp file.iso /dev/sda
this works great but in my experience sometimes you should add
&& sync
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is what made me move away from Ubuntu. Use LTS and encounter issues with outdated packages? "Well duh, you're supposed to upgrade to interim releases if you need remotely up to date software". Use interim releases and encounter bugs? "Well duh, it's an interim release. Of course it's a buggy mess, nobody uses those" Every Fedora release is intended to be solid and they come out twice a year.
I moved to Fedora from Ubuntu about a year ago for my laptop. My main motivation was not be defaulted to snap packages. I have had a great experience i.e it gets out of the way and it doesn't fall apart when I update stuff. I was worried about SELinux but find Fedoras defaults just fine and intuitive.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#276Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fork Ubuntu and threaten their business model, that’ll get their attention. Only half joking.
There's very little incentive to switch. When people release for Linux they almost always first/only test it works on Ubuntu - hence it's going to be the least buggy. (ex: GOG only seemingly tested games on Ubuntu) So the switching cost is buggy software. You'd need something radically different that brings enough new features to the table to make it worth it the switch and dealing with bad/non-existant support. I th…
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Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
cp file.iso /dev/sda
This isn't portable though, it's a GNU-specific "smart" things. Elsewhere, this overwrites the target device file.
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#279I'm struggling to see the upside of replacing working coreutils when the replacement still has bugs that the old implementation doesn't. Rust being safer is nice, but that doesn't help much if the new rm segfaults
Re: Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
#280Earlier 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.
Redirection doesn't overwrite device files, so
cat foo.img > /dev/sda