Hi,
Let me begin by mentioning that I am an active contributor to the GNU
coreutils. I mention this for transparency, although this message
primarily addresses social concerns that I have, rather than technical
ones. Therefore, I hope it is not disregarded for being biased.
On May 8, 2025, Julian Andres Klode requested the addition of the
"gnu-coreutils" package so that "coreutils" could be made a virtual
package that dispatched to different providers [1]. The maintainer of
the "coreutils" Debian package said that he would not make this change
without discussion on debian-devel [2], which I feel is reasonable.
Remember that "coreutils" is an "Essential" package and therefore needs
to be treated with extra care [3].
This change was obviously an attempt to make the lives of Canonical, who
employees Julian Andres Klode, easier. A few months before the request
for the "gnu-coreutils" package, Canonical announced they were
replacing GNU coreutils with uutils coreutils [4].
As far as I can tell, the request to discuss this on debian-devel was
never respected. The only brief discussion of coreutils on debian-devel
since these events were when someone noticed that the "coreutils"
package in Debian Expiremental used "coreutils-from-*" packages to
choose between GNU, uutils, busybox, or toybox [5].
Around that time, I had noticed that uutils coreutils was made the
default in Debian Expiremental. You can see that this is still the case
with the following:
$ podman run --rm -it debian:bookworm
$ echo 'Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian/
Suites: experimental
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg' >
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.sources
$ { apt update -y; apt upgrade -y; } >/dev/null 2>&1
$ apt -t experimental install coreutils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
libattr1
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following additional packages will be installed:
coreutils-from-uutils rust-coreutils
The following NEW packages will be installed:
coreutils-from-uutils rust-coreutils
The following packages will be upgraded:
coreutils
1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.
Need to get 4650 kB of archives.
After this operation, 6871 kB of additional disk space will be used.
I also noticed the uutils website says the following [6]:
Debian is also following Ubuntu's path toward making uutils the default.
A Google Summer of Code 2024 project - "Improve support of the Rust
coreutils in Debian" - was mentored to accelerate the integration. The
package is also inherited by downstream Debian-based distributions
including Raspbian, Kali Linux, Parrot OS, PureOS, and deepin 23.
It seems that a small handful of people are unilaterally making the
decision to switch the default Debian install from GNU coreutils to
uutils coreutils, which concerns me. I had hoped that the plan was to
bring this up on debian-devel, as originally requested, but I have not
seen any indication that is the case over the past few months.
The decision to change to uutils coreutils in Ubuntu was quite
controversial, as can easily be seen in various forum posts and bug
reports. I believe these changes, which seem to be intentionally made in
secret, are an attempt to avoid reigniting said controversy. I can
understand this, as many had strong opinions, as I do, and expressed
them rudely, which is part of the reason I have avoided linking them.
However, I do not believe that it is best for Debian if decisions like
this are made unilaterally in secret. Therefore, I am bringing awareness
of this change to debian-devel.
Collin
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1104906#5
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1104906#15
[3] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#essential-packages
[4]
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-oxidising-ubuntu/56995
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/04/msg00004.html
[6] https://uutils.org/users/
