What do you think about replacing gnu core-utils with uutils by default in nixos?

Development
4

Here’s the forum post discussing it for reference: Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu - Project Discussion - Ubuntu Community Hub

I think there would be more benefit than only “OOH RUST” in making uutils the default – like those mentioned in the “But Why?” section of the above post – but I can agree those probably aren’t worth 20% of the test suite still failing (and portability concerns)

It seems Ubuntu is working with upstream though

There will certainly be a few rough edges we’ll need to work out. In my testing, for example, the only incompatibility I’ve come across is that the update-initramfs script for Ubuntu uses cp -Z to preserve selinux labels when copying files. The cp, mv and ls commands from uutils don’t yet support the -Z flag, but I think we’ve worked out a way to unblock that work going forward, both in the upstream and in the next release of Ubuntu.

so maybe one day we could more seriously consider this? But I don’t think we want most users on NixOS to experience these “rough edges” while they still exist. I would also be curious to see how many incompatibilities we come across in replacing the coreutils in Nixpkgs’ stdenv, rather than only testing on somewhat basic OS tooling

FWIW, you can (mostly) replace coreutils with uutils on your own system already with

1 Like