OS agnostic golang cads to replace coreutils etc

[gedw99]

Anyone thinking about the idea of having base OS agnostic golang commands to kind of replace core utils ?

I did a brief search but found nothing here in discussions. I think I might have raised this before though..

Anyway here's my current thoughts ...

I dont think these should be "included" in task, but rather could be a separate repo, hopefully community supported and it the GitHub org, so that we can build up a nice selection..

I actually dont think we want to match the naming conventions like

ls -al
mkdir -p
rm --rf
wget

because it will never quite match.

Instead I kind of went with uniques ones that I found along the way.

https://github.com/a8m/tree replaces ls

https://github.com/bitrise-io/got/tree/master/cmd/wgot replaces wget nicely.

[pd93]

This has been discussed at length in #197 and mvdan/sh#93 and remains one of the most important tickets (IMO). However, a lot of work is required to complete this.

I dont think these should be "included" in task, but rather could be a separate repo

There have been several attempts to make a coreutils written in Go (namely u-root). Ideally, this is not something maintained by the Task team, as it would significantly increase the amount of maintenance required. Unfortunately, even using u-root is not trivial because of issues like u-root/u-root#2527.

Tools like tree and wgot will never be a part of Task IMO. Anything we add would need to behave identically to coreutils so that the behavior is predictable and consistent across platforms. However, if you're happy to install external cross-platform tools and call them from Task, then this is a perfectly good solution.

[gedw99]

I know u-root well and used it on other projects. It’s not a good match for the things we need. It’s too literal imho .

I am not suggesting that these OS compat packages be compiled with task.

just more to have a list that can then be used and slowly built up . People can then pick and choose .

they work very well for me .

others will see the list and over time it will get more things.

so maybe just in the readme of task , can list the tools .