How hard would it be to replace coreutils with a replacement?

1

Just a quick question, would it be possible to replace coreutils with something like busybox?

1 Like
2

You’ll probably need to scope this to get good answers. If you mean nixpkgs-wide, I’d guess it’s a nonstarter as long as it’s marked Linux-only.

3

I can understand; some many Linux only programs probably have coreutils baked in as a dependancy.

4

Almost all packages have coreutils as a dependency because it’s included in stdenv (even pkgsMusl.stdenv). If the replacement isn’t compatible, build scripts may break when they assume coreutils and get something else.

5

That’s not really what I mean. busybox’s platform is marked as only Linux, so if you mean replacing it in all of nixpkgs, you’ll have to cope with it not being available on macos.

(but if you just mean seeing if you can build some specific container with busybox instead of coreutils, someone may have more perspective.)