Fedora with more rust code

Use rust written core utils in fedora

From Ask Fedora to Project Discussion

Added kinoite-team, silverblue-team, workstation-wg

Why??

It is not able to pass enough tests to be a usable replacement candidate yet.

With the v0.0.25 release, Rust Coreutils is passing an additional 15 GNU test suite cases since the prior release. Rust Coreutils continues working toward complete compatibility with GNU Coreutils and thus a goal of passing all the tests. Currently 437 tests are passing, 50 are being skipped, and 117 are failing.

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Because rust codes are usually more secure than c code as it is memory safe.

And the way to help finish this and make it a viable alternative is to contribute to make uutils more complete. Until it is complete (or mostly so), it can break existing usage(s), which is not going to be seen as an acceptable alternative.

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Do you have any real proof that this is more secure than the GNU coreutils?. Also, they are packaged in Fedora and everyone is free to use them instead of GNU coreutils, but I don’t see the point behind forcing everyone to use them by default.

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Regardless of your feelings on Rust vs. C, or uutils licensing, or any other aspect of this, this is probably the only correct answer for some time to come.

If it’s not passing the complete test suite then it’s not a viable replacement. 12 to 24 months from now, it could potentially be one.

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@frankjunior, please stop posting this in new threads without any additional thoughts or new information.

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There is currently a rewrite of basic tools contained in coreutils. It is a work in progress and there are a LOT of tests to pass to be able to even start thinking replacing the trusty and venerable coreutils tools.

If you want to help, that project is a good start. Would be interesting to be able to compare the coreutils to the Rust-version of those tools in security, performance and other considerations.

If we go get some or more Rust somewhere, it might start with basic command-line tools more than anything else.