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by steveklabnik 188 days ago
Ubuntu is evaluating it as the default in order to see if it’s ready. That’s something you want to do before declaring something 1.0.

If it’s not ready, they’ll roll it back.

Part of why you have to do something like this is because the test suite just isn’t comprehensive, nor should we expect it to be. Real world usage is what shakes out the long tail of bugs. You just have to have some sort of stage like this in order to get things into a good state.
2 comments
egorfine 188 days ago
> they’ll roll it back.

They will absolutely not roll it back, not matter how broken they are.

The reasons to switch from coreutils to the Rust rewrite are purely political.

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pseudalopex 188 days ago
> Ubuntu is evaluating it as the default in order to see if it’s ready.

Did 100% of tests pass when Ubuntu made this decision? My understanding was no.

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steveklabnik 188 days ago
No. Because the tests that don’t pass are edge cases and corners that most people wouldn’t notice. It’s arguably more important to fix bugs that impact actual usage, so it can be a valid strategy to do this even before you hit 100% coverage, to help you prioritize the remaining bugs to fix.

In other words, there may be more serious bugs not in the test suite than the ones that aren’t passing that are in the suite. And you only find that out through real usage.

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pseudalopex 188 days ago
> Because the tests that don’t pass are edge cases and corners that most people wouldn’t notice.

This standard may be justified when there is significant benefit. There is not in this case. And some projects have stricter standards.[1]

> In other words, there may be more serious bugs not in the test suite than the ones that aren’t passing that are in the suite. And you only find that out through real usage.

You should assume everyone understands how Ubuntu's decision would benefit this project. You should assume most Ubuntu users do not care. You replied to a comment which told you this before.[2]

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267541

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mzajc 187 days ago
> edge cases and corners that most people wouldn’t notice.

This is a horrible mindset for developing software people are supposed to rely on.

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steveklabnik 187 days ago
Every project prioritizes bugs. It is impossible to work on everything all at once.
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pseudalopex 187 days ago
This discussion is not about priorities in 1 project. It is about the replacement of a more mature project by a less mature project.
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steveklabnik 187 days ago
It is about discovering how less mature a project is so that its maturity can be improved. Nothing has been replaced yet. That decision will be made once its maturity has been evaluated.
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tredre3 188 days ago
Many of the utils, such as sort, aren't locale-aware. Considering that most of the world do not use English/ASCII, do you still consider that an irrelevant edge case?
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steveklabnik 188 days ago
I don't consider it irrelevant, but neither does uutils. However, it's also not something that is currently at a zero. I'm not even sure that this percentage of tests is related to locale support specifically. I'm sure parity will be reached here.

For example, sort has an open PR on it right now.

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pseudalopex 187 days ago
> I'm sure parity will be reached here.

And this project should be considered then. Not before.

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steveklabnik 187 days ago
I would be surprised if they decided to go ahead without more robust locale support, I agree with that.
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