The results of the experiment replacing the GNU Coreutils package with uutils in the Gentoo environment have been published, aiming to test the ability to build and install packages using the Portage package manager, which depends on the features of Coreutils. The uutils coreutils project develops a cross-platform alternative to the GNU Coreutils package, written in Rust, distributed under the permissive MIT license (instead of the copyleft GPL license), and capable of running not only in Linux.
As a result, it was possible to adapt uutils for Portage. For those who wish to continue the experiments, a repository has been prepared that contains a Gentoo stage 3 variant with the necessary modifications for using uutils, suitable for running in a chroot environment. Among the changes made, the following is noted:
- Disabling the build of utilities supplied outside the coreutils package (more, hostname, kill, uptime, groups) that conflict with other packages (util-linux, net-tools, procps, shadow).
- Removing the prefix 'uu-' from commands.
- Creating wrappers for missing utilities (for example,
md5sum and sha256sum are implemented via the call 'cksum -a md5/sha256 --untagged'). - Installing as separate executable files instead of one executable file and symbolic links to it (the emerge utility calls the install-xattr executable, which resolves the symbolic links before execution, causing the general uutils executable to be unable to determine which command has been run).
Source: opennet.ru
