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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.
I'm also sceptical to the whole idea. There are tons of more interesting problems to solve than replacing an stable solution with a new one just because you don't like GPL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would think your first couple points are actually better on a merged system - if /bin==/usr/bin and /lib==/lib64==/usr/lib then scripts can use either /bin/bash or /usr/bin/bash and it'll work (and ditto for libraries). Granted, removing those symlinks would then be painful, but I haven't heard of that being proposed; if it has been and I'm just out of the loop then yeah that'd make me nervous. (Though in fairness,…
> Because you might find the one of the BSDs or illumos more comfortable You know, I would... but Linux has already won the battle... FBSD and Illumos corporate support is already jumping ship to Linux.
Edit: Oh, if you do need Linux, maybe look at Slackware?
Leaving the should uutils be used over coreutils debate aside, this was a fun read for me and the urge to install Gentoo one one of my many old Thinkpads is flaring up hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay; what problems would you expect to hit if you used a system where they were merged? (My best thought so far is having multiple hosts sharing a single /usr over NFS while having per-host root filesystems, but I've never actually seen that done. I've also thought about building a distro that kept its initramfs as root and just mounted everything else into it, but that's even further off the beaten path.)
I can think of a few off the top of my head... - broken shell scripts that are hardcoded to "/bin/bash" rather than "/usr/bin/env bash" (this might work for a while, but what happens when they remove the symlink?) - broken compiles because "/lib" and "/lib64" no longer exist, because of the lack of testing prior to making the change on behalf of users - broken boots because initramfs (dracut/etc) isn't structured cor…
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.
It's not just disrespectful, it's stupid and dangerous. GPL is one of those exceptional things that shaped the world as it is today. These projects are nothing more than an attack to our freedom.
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 binaries or packages from other distributions instead of packages provided by portage.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/profile/package.pr...
Aren't the Rust binaries significantly larger? Wouldn't that be a problem for embedded system and containers? I'm also sceptical to the whole idea. There are tons of more interesting problems to solve than replacing an stable solution with a new one just because you don't like GPL.
I think the argument is usually memory safety rather than licensing.
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.
You could say the same thing about LLVM/Clang. Apple and Google only cooperated on that because they really really dont want a restrictive licence like the GPL. But then again, after a while, Clang is a nice alternative... Which makes me think: Why exactly are you indirectly lobbying for a monopoly? Just because there is a GNU version of something can not mean there shouldnt be any other version. It just can not mean…
I just think that trying to make a permissive drop-in replacement for software that emphasises the very freedoms that have allowed the creation of the replacement in the first place is unfortunate and short-sighted. It’s a good thing that the authors have every right to do it all the same though.