Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilities in Rust

Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by ajross on Monday December 06, 2021 @04:23PM (#29465908)

That's a little out of context. The situation being described[1] is that "rust cannot stat the path '.'". A core requirement of coreutils is to work with a unix filesystem where "." is a valid path. Ergo, from the point of view of the requirements at hand, the rust filesystem layer is "broken". It doesn't do what uutils needs it to do.

[1] And I'll admit that I don't have any understanding of the actual low level issue here or why native pathnames are being interpreted by the runtime and not passed through to the OS layer.

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Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by user-the-name on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @03:45AM (#29470315)

Because if you just pass them through, you will not have consistent behaviour across platforms. That was the original point: Rust implements a consistent, cross-platform filesystem API. It does not necessarily match whatever your platform happens to do.

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Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by ajross on Tuesday December 07, 2021 @11:06AM (#29474073)

But uutils needs to necessarily match whatever your platform happens to do, or else it breaks[1] in silly ways like this when it turns out that "." stops being a path.

[1] Maybe this is all just a semantic argument about this use of the word "broken"? This is a long-standing usage. It doesn't mean that Rust's standard library isn't useful for anything, it means that it isn't useful here because of design choices that don't match the problem at hand. If it were something that can be fixed, it would just be "buggy". But it can't (for the reasons you mention!). Therefore it's "broken", not "buggy".

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