The coreutils Rust rewrite story is pretty funny.

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@ireneista @lcamtuf
I guess that could work if you really investigate all the fundamental mistakes, as well as the regular bugs/pitfalls, from the first time and try your best to avoid them.

Assuming that "it was written in a less safe language" was the only or even most important issue is.. not that useful

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@Doomed_Daniel @lcamtuf yeah, exactly

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@Doomed_Daniel @lcamtuf we firmly believe, for ourselves, that code is communication

and one very big thing it's communicating is: hey, future maintainer, this detail is important

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@ireneista @lcamtuf
Additional fun thought: I can imagine they avoided looking at the GNU coreutils C implementation because they are using MIT license instead of GPL.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@Doomed_Daniel @lcamtuf ouch. welp.

[puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social]

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place Well there's always the ability for clean room implementation, no?

[doomed_daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@puppygirlhornypost2 @lcamtuf @ireneista
sure, but needs more people, and some of them won't get to do the fun part (writing new code)

they could've looked at musl though, I assume it does not have the same bugs (but am too lazy to check)

[puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social]

@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space I think you mistook musl for BusyBox. I did the same thing in my head. (musl is an MIT-licensed C standard library implementation) It appears BusyBox (alternative to gnu coreutils) is also licensed under GPLv2, unfortunately.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@puppygirlhornypost2 @lcamtuf @Doomed_Daniel ... wait, is BusyBox an alternative? we thought it was the same coreutils, just bundled in a single executable for deployment reasons?

[fiore@brain.worm.pink]

@puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @ireneista@irenes.space busybox is not an alternative to gnu coreutils , it doesnt care to be coreutils compatible .. uutils does (for some reason??)

[puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social]

@fiore@brain.worm.pink @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space I mean there's "alternative" and then there's "drop in replacement". I guess that was a linguistic issue on my part. I did not mean to imply busybox is supposed to be a remake of gnu coreutils. Some commands/programs/whatever (the windows sysadmin in me wants to say commandlets lol) of coreutils such as shuf are not available on busybox. I do see it advertised as a light weight alternative to gnu coreutils in server applications. Specifically when you don't need GNU coreutils-specific features

[puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social]

@fiore@brain.worm.pink @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space iirc busybox is often used in initramfs and other light environments like containers. I mean, on my Gentoo desktop, I have the busybox module installed for dracut, so it's packed into my initramfs... but also that's not something that's default with the distribution.

[fiore@brain.worm.pink]

@puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @ireneista@irenes.space yep . if you wanna run stuff in containers , theres little to no point to use something other than alpine as a container base .

[puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social]

@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place I thought it was entirely independent from gnu coreutils.

[fiore@brain.worm.pink]

@puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place @ireneista@irenes.space it is . it ships many commands that coreutils does , but its a completely indipendent implementation .