[12_throw_away]

> The root cause of some of the bugs seems to be the opaque nature of some of the Unix API.

Some, maybe, but if you've decided to rewrite coreutils from scratch, understanding the POSIX APIs is literally your entire job.

And in any case, their test for whether a path was pointing to the fs root was `file == Path::new("/")`. That's not an API problem, the problem is that whoever wrote that is uniquely unqualified to be working on this project.

[aw1621107]

Interestingly, it looks like the `file == Path::new("/")` bit was basically unchanged from when it was introduced... 12 (!) years ago [0] (though back then it was `filename == "/"`). The change from comparing a filename to a path was part of a change made 8 months ago to handle non-UTF-8 filenames.

> That's not an API problem, the problem is that whoever wrote that is uniquely unqualified to be working on this project.

To be fair, uutils started out with far smaller ambitions. It was originally intended to be a way to learn Rust.

[0]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/7abc6c007af75504f...

[ordu]

> Some, maybe, but if you've decided to rewrite coreutils from scratch, understanding the POSIX APIs is literally your entire job.

Yes, it is. But still such traps in API just unacceptable. If you design API that requires obscure knowledge to do it right, and if you do it wrong you'll get privilege escalation, it is just... just... I have no words for it. It is beyond stupidity. You are just making sure that your system will get these privilege escalations, and not just once, but multiple times.

[ambicapter]

No one is under any impression (or should be) that the POSIX API isn't old and legacy. That's not why we still use it.