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collinfunk

316 karmajoined há 3 anos

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collinfunk
·há 17 horas·discuss
I co-maintain GNU coreutils and wrote the Neon 'wc -l' code, for reference.

Based on my quick look at the source code, it looks like this program can handle ASCII whitespace. GNU coreutils uses iswspace, which is locale-aware. That limits how much we can optimize. We could probably add more optimization if the current locale is ASCII, e.g., LC_ALL=C on GNU/Linux.
collinfunk
·anteontem·discuss
The others and I, working on GNU coreutils, frequently use 'yes' to generate a bunch of garbage input for testing programs. It is nice that it can do so quickly.
collinfunk
·há 15 dias·discuss
The author states that they are not a lawyer, which is all good and okay. However, immediately afterwards they seem to claim that they know the law better than GNU, the FSF, and their lawyers. It confuses me how the author does not see that as a problem.
collinfunk
·há 28 dias·discuss
> Why would you mention the labs in connection to a question specifically about bio weapons?

Which situation do you think looks worse, admitting to having biological research facilities (unrelated to weaponry), or having Russians invade, take over one of said research facilities, and run with whatever story they want to justify their war?
collinfunk
·há 28 dias·discuss
> is it really that big of a jump to connect gain of function research and bioweaponry?

Have you seen any evidence for the bio-weaponry claim?

> to be fair the world genuinely believes COVID spontaneously manifested directly next to a US funded COVID research site, so perhaps the gap is really that wide.

You would need more evidence than proximity to prove that.
collinfunk
·há 28 dias·discuss
The whole "biolab" thing is pretty common Russian propaganda [1]. Unsurprising to hear Gabbard parroting it yet again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_bioweapons_conspiracy_...
collinfunk
·mês passado·discuss
Well, they have held back some slop in CPAN (a surprising place to find slop) [1]. Some of said slop recently caused GNU coreutils test suite to fail [2]. Surely the bot will get it right one day, right?

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/971488 [2] https://github.com/cpan-authors/IO-Tty/issues/91
collinfunk
·há 2 meses·discuss
This came up again recently when I added SHA-3 support to 'cksum'. I think the conclusion was that OpenSSL was still faster. All of Assaf's points are good too, though.
collinfunk
·há 2 meses·discuss
At the current moment I would be against it. The language and library is changing too fast. Also, Rust has some other things that make it hard to use for coreutils. For example, Rust programs always call signal (SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN) or equivalent code before main(). There is no stable way to get the longstanding behavior of inheriting the signal action from the parent process [1]. This is quite annoying, but not unique to Rust [2].

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/unstable-book/compiler-flags/... [2] https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/sigpipe_handling.html
collinfunk
·há 2 meses·discuss
No need to apologize at all. Doing it in one cd invocation would fail since the file name is longer than PATH_MAX. In that case passing it to a system call would fail with errno set to ENAMETOOLONG.

You could probably make the loop more efficient, but it works good enough. Also, some shells don't allow you to enter directories that deep entirely. It doesn't work on mksh, for example.
collinfunk
·há 2 meses·discuss
Hi, I am one of the maintainers of GNU Coreutils. Thanks for the article, it covers some interesting topics. In the little Rust that I have used, I have felt that it is far too easy to write TOCTOU races using std::fs. I hope the standard library gets an API similar to openat eventually.

I just want to mention that I disagree with the section titled "Rule: Resolve Paths Before Comparing Them". Generally, it is better to make calls to fstat and compare the st_dev and st_ino. However, that was mentioned in the article. A side effect that seems less often considered is the performance impact. Here is an example in practice:

  $ mkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')
  $ while cd $(yes a/ | head -n 1024 | tr -d '\n'); do :; done 2>/dev/null
  $ echo a > file
  $ time cp file copy

  real 0m0.010s
  user 0m0.002s
  sys 0m0.003s
  $ time uu_cp file copy

  real 0m12.857s
  user 0m0.064s
  sys 0m12.702s
I know people are very unlikely to do something like that in real life. However, GNU software tends to work very hard to avoid arbitrary limits [1].

Also, the larger point still stands, but the article says "The Rust rewrite has shipped zero of these [memory saftey bugs], over a comparable window of activity." However, this is not true [2]. :)

[1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics [2] https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-w9vv-q986-vj7x
collinfunk
·há 3 meses·discuss
> There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance.

His rationale for invading Ukraine was to "demilitarise and denazify" it. The NATO point seems largely be invented by people who dislike NATO in the west.

> They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable.

I hope the "tension" you are referring to was not the little green men taking over Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

> Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.

This is a totally unseriousness statement. Can you remind me what Putin was doing in Syria again?
collinfunk
·há 3 meses·discuss
You see zero similarities between Hitler invading Poland and Putin invading Ukraine?
collinfunk
·há 3 meses·discuss
Another maintainer and I follow issues and pull requests on a GitHub mirror. But email works fine for us and many other projects.

Regarding poor UX, it is difficult to dispute with that claim without a specific example. Note that a lot of the features we support are standardized by POSIX. Even if we dislike the behavior, it is better to comply with the standards so the programs don't behave differently than users expect. The sentence you quote isn't meant to put down users. These programs are often much more complex than meets the eye, and there are lots of common gotchas that people have run into (and will continue to do so) [1].

Of course we would love for these programs to be useful for everyone. However, feature requests are often incompatible with existing behavior, incompatible with other feature requests, or have existing functionality elsewhere. For those reasons we cannot accept every feature request.

[1] https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html
collinfunk
·há 3 meses·discuss
Well the TOCTOU issues do not require you to run untrusted scripts to be exploited. Another user on your system can use a legitimate command that you may run to make changes to files they shouldn’t be able to, or further escalate privileges.
collinfunk
·há 3 meses·discuss
I am one of them. The title of the substack seems fine since it mentions "if you use iTerm2".

The tweet has no mention of iTerm2 which makes it sound like an issue in 'cat', which is mildly annoying [1].

[1] https://x.com/calif_io/status/2045207168677503241
collinfunk
·há 4 meses·discuss
fileutils-1.0 was released in 1990 [1]. shellutils-1.0 was released in 1991 [2], and textutils-1.0 was released a month later in the same year [3].

Those three packages were combined into coreutils-5.0 in 2003 [4].

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/CviP42X_hCY/m/Ys... [2] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/xpTRtuFpNQc/m/mR... [3] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/iN5KuoJYRhU/m/V_... [4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2003-04/msg00000...
collinfunk
·há 4 meses·discuss
The bar for adding new options, especially short options, is quite high for coreutils. We have a (likely outdated) page of rejected requests [1]. Some of the changes people have strong feelings about...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.htm...
collinfunk
·há 6 meses·discuss
I don't think this addresses the main point of my question, though. Do you know any prominent Democrats, e.g., representatives, senators, or presidents, who have called for a Republican to be killed?
collinfunk
·há 6 meses·discuss
Even if one grants that it is a small minority, aren't they still voting for someone who advocates for jailing and killing political opponents?