TLDR: we are making progress on the Rust implementation of the GNU coreutils. Well, it is an understatement to say my previous blog post interested many people. Many articles, blog posts and some podcasts talked about it! As we pushed coreutils 0.0.12 a few days ago and getting closer to the 10 000 stars on github, it is now time to give an update! This has brought a lot of new contributors to this project. Instead of 30 to 60 patches per month, we jumped to 400 to 472 patches every month. Similarly, we saw an increase in the number of contributors (20 to 50 per month from 3 to 8). Two new maintainers (Michael Debertol & Terts Diepraam) stepped in and have been doing a much better job than myself as reviewers now! As a silly metric, according to github, we had 5 561 clones of the repository over the last 2 weeks! The new contributors focused on:

• Performances. Now, some binaries are significantly faster than GNU (ex: head, cut, etc)
• Adding missing binaries or options (see below)
• Improve the testsuite: we grew the overall code coverage from 55% to 75% (in general, we consider that a 80% code coverage on a project is excellent).
• Refactoring the code to simplify the maintenance. Examples:
  • Using the same code for permissions for chgrp and chown
  • Managing error the same way in the various binaries - (Kudos to Jeffrey Finkelstein for the huge work)
  • Improving the GNU compatibility (thanks to Jan Verbeek, Jan Scheer, kimono-koans and many others)
  • Move to clap 3. Upgrade by Terts which unblocks us on various problems.
• ...

Closing the gap with GNU As far as I know, we are only missing stty (change and print terminal line settings) as a program. Thanks to some heroes, basenc, pr, chcon and runcon have been implemented. For example, for the two last programs, Koutheir Attouchi wrote new crates to manage SELinux properly. This crate has been used for some other utilities like cp, ls or id. Leveraging the GNU testsuite to test this implementation Because the GNU testsuite is excellent, we now have a proper CI using it to run the tests. It is pretty long on the Github action CI (almost two hours to run it) but it is an amazing improvement to the way we work. It was a joint work from a bunch of folks (James Robson, Roy Ivy III, etc). To achieve this, we also made it easier to run the GNU testsuite locally with the Rust implementation but also to ignore some tests or adjust some error messages (see build-gnu.sh and run-gnu-test.sh). Following a suggestion of Brian G, a colleague at Mozilla (he did the same for some Firefox major change), we are now collecting the history of fail/pass/error into a separate repository and generating a daily graph showing the evolution of regression. At this date, we have, with GNU/Coreutils 9.0:

Total	611 tests
Pass	214
Skip	84
Fail	298
Error	15

We are now automatically identifying new passing tests and regressions in the CI. For example:
Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/c-option is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/silent is now passing!
<br />Warning: Congrats! The gnu test tests/chmod/umask-x is now passing!
<br />Error: GNU test failed: tests/du/long-from-unreadable. tests/du/long-from-unreadable is passing on 'master'. Maybe you have to rebase?
[...]
<br />Warning: Changes from master: PASS +4 / FAIL +0 / ERROR -4 / SKIP +0
This is also beneficial to GNU as, by implementing some options, Michael Debertol noticed some incorrect behaviors (with sort and cat) or an uninitialized variable (with chmod). Documentations Every day, we are generating the user documentation and of the internal coreutils. User documentation: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/user/ Example: ls or cp The internal documentation can be seen on: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/dev/uucore/
For example, the backup style is documented here: https://uutils.github.io/coreutils-docs/dev/uucore/backup_control/index.html More? Besides my work on Debian/Ubuntu, I have also noticed that more and more operating systems are starting to look at this:

• Brew is proposing coreutils (with the latest version) https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/93404
• Sandro is working to be able to run NixOS on Rust/Coreutils. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/116274 for the interesting discussions there.
• Apertis (Linux distro for the automotive industry) has forked my Debian patches to make it the default coreutils https://gitlab.apertis.org/pkg/rust-coreutils/-/tree/apertis/v2023dev1/debian
• I also noticed an interest from Redox OS.

In parallel, https://github.com/uutils/findutils/, a rust dropped-in replacement for find, is getting more attention lately! Here, the graph showing the evolution of the program using the BFS testsuite (much better than GNU's). What is next?

1. stty needs to be implemented
2. Improve the GNU compatibility on key programs and reduce the gap
3. Investigate how to reduce the size of the binaries
4. Allow Debian and Ubuntu to switch by default without tricky manipulation

How to help? I have been maintaining a list of good first bugs for new comers in the repo! Don't hesitate to contribute, it is much easier than it seems and a terrific way to learn Rust!

After two and half months of development, new Gammu stable release is out. Since last testing version there are only minor changes in vCard export, but full changelog since 1.21.0 is quite long:

• Disable ATOBEX for Motorola V180.
• vCard can now store caller group and private flag (bug #269).
• vCard now stores location and memory type.
• Add ID for Nokia 6131 NFC (bug #775).
• Better skipping of corrupted messages in AT (bug #768).
• Autoload 6510 module if phone is S40 (bug #767).
• Add ID for Nokia 6500s (bug #770).
• Add automatic detection of Nokia phones (bug #770).
• Catch error when calls can not be deleted (bug #738).
• Better documentation of addnew (bug #734).
• Fix detection of OBEX capability on older Siemens phones.
• Try to detect wrongly formatted CMGL reply (bug #771);
• Handle phones which fail to report supported charsets.
• Fixed encoding of WAP indicator messages.
• Support for photos in vCard (bug #227).
• vC* saving now protects against buffer overflows.
• Drop own crosscompilation support, rely on CMake one.
• Also standard CMake parameters used when possible (eg. BUILDSHAREDLIBS).
• Search does not create thread for non existing devices.
• Fixed possible crash when backing up ringtones.
• Fix possible race condition in searching.
• Fixed invoking of CMake with output to custom directory.
• Compile on platforms where ssize_t does not exist.
• Fix detection of towlower on some compilers.
• Make Bluetooth compile using BCC.
• Fix compilation if strtoull does not exist.
• Compile on platforms where intptr_t does not exist.
• Fixed compilation in BCC (see changes above).
• Check whether compiler supports FUNCTION.
• Reimplement locking and add tests for it.
• GSM_SetDebugFileDescriptor now accepts flag whether file descriptor can be closed (bug #749).
• Soname change due to API breakage (see above).
• Fixed compilation on Mac OS X, thanks to Juan A. Bertolin for testing.
• Script gammu-config can now also work with whiptail.
• Minor fixes in gammu-config script.
• Extra spaces from connection or device name are now stripped.
• Automatically reinitialize FBUS connection if it is dropped.
• Disable OBEX with Motorola Z6c, it is broken (bug #746).
• Refresh manufacturer information on second init of AT (bug #746).
• Always get charset information on AT phone initialization.
• Better handling of OBEX switching for Siemens phones.
• Fix flags for 2630 and 3109c (bug #752).
• Fix handling of caller groups and picture IDs (bug #752).
• Properly set calendar location while adding (bug #747).
• Sign Windows binaries during build.
• Detect long FM station names (bug #727).
• Add ID for Nokia 2630b.
• Handle properly very long lines in vcards (bug #728).
• Do not build and install locales if gettext is not compiled.
• Increase number of calendar entries (bug #725).
• Leak free test runs.
• Support backup of phone phonebook from Siemens (bug #732).
• Properly handle GetNextMemory on Siemens (bug #732).
• Save textual category to backup (bug #737).
• Enable dashboard testing using CTest/CDash.
• Add option to do coverage analysis.
• Properly handle debug file closing.
• Add test case for debug logging.
• Fix decoding of some SMS messages from Nokia phones (bug #735).
• Hack for (still) unknown error code (bug #733).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Binary packages will be available soon in all usual places (Debian Unstable, OpenSuse build service, Ubuntu PPA repository).

Good news everyone, new Gammu testing version is out. This time biggest fix is Bluetooth support for Mac OS X, accompanied with fixed locking on some architectures and improved debug configuration, to allow proper integration with python-gammu. Full list of changes:

• Reimplement locking and add tests for it.
• GSM_SetDebugFileDescriptor now accepts flag whether file descriptor can be closed (bug #749).
• Soname change due to API breakage (see above).
• Fixed compilation on Mac OS X, thanks to Juan A. Bertolin for testing.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

Joint press release from Novell and Microsoft. Took me by surprise, thanks for the link, Dani. Diagnosis: Microsoft is very afraid. It lost Massachusetts on the Office front, it lost M nchen on the Desktop front (financially, both cases are no big deal. But they created quite a media stir.), and Xen is the big buzzword in the server rooms, while I can't even remember if Microsoft has a similar offering... What will happen? Microsoft will remember that selling MS Office licenses, even if they run on their arch-enemy-OS, is better than not selling MS Office licenses. Dito for Xen. If played right, I think Novell might be in a very good position here. On the other hand, there are many, many companies who did business with Microsoft once and don't exist anymore. And probably Novell needs the money. Disclaimer: I can call myself Industry Analyst if I want to. Others do, and probably know less than I. Others don't but know a lot more. Update: After reading the coverage on Groklaw: Novell is a business, and it's their business decision. Maybe they end up as roadkill. And I'm not talking about the Linux market, but about Linux as a piece of software. And Microsoft officially investing in Linux technology (even with the goal to embrace and extend it) will still lead to wider Linux adaptation and the eventual breaking of the Microsoft monopoly.

Joint press release from Novell and Microsoft. Took me by surprise, thanks for the link, Dani. Diagnosis: Microsoft is very afraid. It lost Massachusetts on the Office front, it lost M nchen on the Desktop front (financially, both cases are no big deal. But they created quite a media stir.), and Xen is the big buzzword in the server rooms, while I can't even remember if Microsoft has a similar offering... What will happen? Microsoft will remember that selling MS Office licenses, even if they run on their arch-enemy-OS, is better than not selling MS Office licenses. Dito for Xen. If played right, I think Novell might be in a very good position here. On the other hand, there are many, many companies who did business with Microsoft once and don't exist anymore. And probably Novell needs the money. Disclaimer: I can call myself Industry Analyst if I want to. Others do, and probably know less than I. Others don't but know a lot more. Update: After reading the coverage on Groklaw: Novell is a business, and it's their business decision. Maybe they end up as roadkill. And I'm not talking about the Linux market, but about Linux as a piece of software. And Microsoft officially investing in Linux technology (even with the goal to embrace and extend it) will still lead to wider Linux adaptation and the eventual breaking of the Microsoft monopoly.