Comment by tambre
14 days ago
Worth noting is that in Debian experimental coreutils defaults to coreutils-from-uutils [0]. This came as a big surprise and as far as I can tell there's been no discussion. A Canonical developer seems to have unilaterally overwritten the coreutils package without discussing with the maintainer. All the package renames that are in Ubuntu aren't in Debian so you can't switch to GNU utils either without deep trickery in a separate recovery environment.
I'm used to running experimental software but I wasn't ready for my computer to not boot one day because of uutils. The `-Z` flag for `cp` wasn't implemented in the 9 month old version shipped in Debian at that time so initramfs creation failed...
that... seems newsworthy on its own merit.
It's in experimental only, not unstable or testing. That said I'm surprised it hasn't even propmpted discussion on debian-devel (sans [0]). I would've thought that at least enough Debian developers run experimental to have noticed and raise the issue, but no. I thought about starting a thread myself but couldn't be bothered.
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/04/msg00004.html
Considering how Ubuntu seems to influence Debian development, this is only slightly surprising.
See: https://lists.debian.org/deity/2025/10/msg00071.html - Hard Rust requirements from May onward - by a Core Ubuntu Developer