Ubuntu 25.10's Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage for Some Executables

so it is a bug. bs is one thing, ibs is another.

Difficult to say with certainty, because it's easy to dress "political" resistance in respectable preference for stability. (Scare quotes because it's an amalgam in which politics is just a part.) Besides, TFA is Phoronix, whose commentariat is not known for subtlety on this topic.

Replacing coreutils is risky because of the decades of refinement/stagnation (depending on your viewpoint) which will inevitably produce snags when component utilities interact in ways unforeseen by tests -- as has happened here. But without risk there's no reward. Of course, what's the reward here is subject to debate. IMO the self-evident advantage of a rewrite is that it's prima facie evidence of interest in using the language, which is significant if there's a dearth of maintainers for the originals. (The very vocal traditionalists are usually not in a hurry to contribute.)

I understand the argument, and its sounds good as far as most things go, but it misses an important fact: In OSS, you can and should find your own bliss. If you want to learn Rust, as I did, you can do it by reimplementing uutils' sort and ls, and fixing bugs in cp and mv, as I did. That was my bliss. OSS doesn't need to be useful to anyone. OSS can be a learning exercise or it can be simply for love of the game.

The fact that Canonical wants to ship it, right now, simply makes them a little silly. It doesn't say a thing about me, or Rust, or Rust culture.

GNU coreutils first shipped in what, the 1980s? It's so old that it would be very hard to find the first commit. Whereas uutils is still beta software which didn't ask to be representative of "Rust", at all. Moreover, GNU coreutils are still sometimes not compatible with their UNIX forebears. Even considering this first, more modest standard, it is ridiculous to hold this software to it, in particular.

That is the narative that rust fanboys promote. AFAIK rust could be usefull for a particular kind of bugs (memory safety). Rust programs can also have coding errors or other bugs.

Yeah, that's such a tired take. If anything this shows how good Rust's guarantees are. We had a bunch of non-experts rewrite a sizable number of tools that had 40 years of bugfixes applied. And Canonical just pulled the rewritten versions in all at once and there are mostly a few performance regressions on edge cases.

I find this such a great confirmation of the Rust language design. I've seen a few rewrites in my career, and it rarely goes this smoothly.

There are plenty of ecosystems where programs declare a specific library implementation they expect to call into (Rust, Python, Npm, Ruby, Perl, ...) often even constrained by versions. But also if you depend on libcurl you are only going to have to deal with multiple verions of the same implementation (that you can still constrain in e.g. pkg-config).

In shell scripting you have to deal with stuff like "in nc, EOF on stdin is undefined behavior and implementation specific".

"Interim releases will introduce new capabilities from Canonical and upstream open source projects, they serve as a proving ground for these new capabilities." https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

I don't follow, can you explain why?

That is not a quote from that post. I am very much not pedantic about only using quotation marks for quotes as long as it reasonably accurately gets the gist right, but in this case it very much doesn't.

You are leaving out the qualified language of "generally", which completely changes what was said. And worse, the post explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't solve all bugs in the next sentence.

And even if you can dig deep and find someone using unqualified language somewhere, I'm willing to bet a lot of money that this is an oversight and when pressed they will immediately admit so (on account of this being an internet forum and not a scientific paper, and people are careless sometimes). "I like coffee" rarely means "I always like coffee, all the time, without exception".

Writing bugs in Rust is trivial and happens all the time. "do_stuff(sysv[1], sysv[2])" is a bug if you reversed the sysv arguments by accident. You can easily create a more complex version of that with a few "if" conditionals and interaction with other flags.

There are many such silly things people can – and do – trivially get wrong all the time. Most bugs I've written are of the "I'm a bloody idiot"-type. The only way to have a fool-proof compiler is to know intent.

What people may say is something like "if it compiles, then it runs", which is generally true, but doesn't mean it does the right thing (i.e. is free of bugs).

  $ ldd /usr/bin/cksum
   linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fb354763000)
   libc.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fb354549000)
   /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /usr/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fb354765000)

If the Void people wanted to enable OpenSSL, they would probably just need to add openssl (or whatever they package it as) to the package dependencies.

[1] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/0d77e1b7ea2840... [2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OpenSSL