Sylvestre's blog

@Divlo it is still going to take a while to have it ready for Debian but I will communicate here and on twitter significant progress!

Whatever happens, GNU coreutils still stay around for decades ;)

Awesome, really a great project idea!
Looking foward to have Debian and Ubuntu switch by default.
Is there is any tracking issue to know when it will be stable (1.0.0) and maybe replaced entirely in Ubuntu/Debian?

I’m wondering once the project will have feature/behavior parity with GNU coreutils and that it will be used by lot of users: is GNU coreutils will continue to be maintained and is staying up to date with GNU coreutils will not be too hard?

Reducing the size of binaries at this point may be tricky, given the argument parser story in rust right now.
From a compatibility point of view, clap is the best fit, and is recommended for most use cases.
It does however, bloat the binary by close to a megabyte.
Other parsers such as argh have much smaller footprint, but don’t support things like “—arg=value”, which may make the compatibility story much harder.

One might wonder what the gap is there, and whether forking argh or a similar arg parser is an option here.

@ivan, for now, nothing has been done on the l10n side.

Should not be too hard but low priority for now :)

Linux distros have been applying the i18n patch to GNU coreutils since 2001. I’m guessing that this project has i18n support out of the box, but can you please confirm? If it does maybe you should mention that as a selling point over GNU coreutils.

@Bo, no, we aren’t storing them but easy to generate again yourself :)

Is it possible to use these clang compiled packages from a gcc based Debian distribution?

@Jorg because crates are directly shipped into the final binary. No work has been done to minimize the size.

There are some options to do it: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

Interesting project!

Can you elaborate, why the Rust package is so much bigger than the C package?

On the one hand, I’d absolutely love using well written utilities that I spend 50% of my terminal time on.

I bet they would add colors and what not.

On the other, I have to wonder if the people writing the new stuff understand things in and out enough to be able to cover every last case. I mean if my cp is silently doing data corruption in some edge case, that won’t be worth the productivity I gained from using better developed new tools

Regardless of the decision to stop the debian migration endeavour, it definitely has had positive ripple effects on code quality throughout the vast free software ecosystem.
Thanks for all your effort Sylvestre! : )

I think stopping the goal of switching is a mistake. LLVM has better sanitizers (which help portability and security), more frequent releases (which make it easier to adopt new versions), and seems to be the basis for a lot of new research in compilers.

The bugs that prevent the switch are, at this point, generally real bugs in the code.

what is shipping?
what is USD or EURO for swiss army knife?
how much for umbrella and hat together/?

I think Clang should stop having just a single command line toolset. It should have a compatibility interface for gcc, with same switches and warning/error handling as gcc, and a Clang main frontend, with possibily different switches and different default settings for warnings/error.

@teh 1

> what’s the general reason why everything won’t compile on Clang?
There are various reasons:
* bad code that gcc accepts
* non standard C code accepted by gcc (variable length array for example)
* -Wall (+ -Werror) does not enable the same set of warnings
* clang is C99 by default, not gcc.
* etc

Out of pure intellectual curiosity, what’s the general reason why everything won’t compile on Clang? Is it that GCC ignores errors and alows non-standard code? Or is it Clang that didn’t implement everything according to standards? (In terms of C and C++ standards)

You might be interested in the Gentoo tracker for Clang-specific failures:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408963

Amazing decrease from 9.5% to 5.7%.
I guess it will be possible to compile a full Linux distribution with clang in only a few years.

Very nice work Sylvestre.
:)

Aaron, Planet Debian has already an account:
https://twitter.com/planetdebian

Vincent, why not but it would help to get that in a better format (RSS, XML or RFC 822 format).