Recently, the results of an experiment were published regarding the replacement of the GNU Coreutils package with Uutils in the Gentoo systemic environment. The experiment was conducted to test the ability to collect and install packages in such an environment using the Portage package manager, which is closely tied to the capabilities of Coreutils. The project known as Uutils Coreutils is focused on developing a cross-platform alternative to the GNU Coreutils package. This alternative is written in a language distributed under the MIT Permissive License and is not limited to Linux operating systems.
After some modifications, Uutils was successfully adapted for use with Portage in the Gentoo environment. For those interested in further experiments, a repository has been prepared. This repository contains the Gentoo Stage 3 version with the necessary changes to enable the use of Uutils, making it suitable for launching in a Chroot environment. Some of the notable changes made include:
- Identification of utilities provided outside the Coreutils package (such as More, Hostname, Kill, Uptime, Groups) that may conflict with other packages (such as Util-Linux, Net-Tools, ProCPS, SHADOW).
- Introduction of commands with the prefix “uu-“.
- Creation of bindings for missing utilities (for example, MD5SUM and Sha256SUM are implemented using the call “CKSUM -A MD5/SHA256 –Untagged”).
- Installation of separate executable files instead of a single executable file with symbolic links. This change was made to address an issue where the general executable UUTILS file could not determine which command was being launched due to a symbolic link created by the Emerge utility.