In Ubuntu, the attached patch was applied to achieve the following:
Rename the binary package to gnu-coreutils and build binaries with 'gnu' prefix.
The prefix choice is debatable, like many years ago I added `g` and
`gnu` as supported prefixes to apt's test suite for FreeBSD and friends,
and I'd have preferred `g` but `gcp` and `gstat` and a bunch of others
are already taken.
This patch could be uploaded to experimental, and in combination with
the new coreutils-from package which takes over the coreutils binary
and provides several coreutils-from-{gnu,uutils,toybox,busybox}
binaries would then provide an upgrade path.
An alternative choice can be made where GNU coreutils would not
be co-installable with other coreutils and coreutils itself
instead provides coreutils-from; and adds protective diversions
for switches with other coreutils-from providers.
However, it stands to reason that having the ability to run
say gnucp when say cp from uutils is insufficient is helpful; but
it may be less useful for Debian if it doesn't want to switch the
default (and the toybox/busybox cases are for minimizing image size,
you don't want co-installability).
For Ubuntu we had to do a rename of some sort, such that the
coreutils binary upgrades people to coreutils-from-uutils.
Thanks for considering the patch.