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Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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It's expected, because the tools are still in development and have not reached 100% test covered yet. Ubuntu 25.10 is not a long term version, so ideal for real world testing. But now we can expect copy-pasta ai blog posts all over the place. And personal attacks against the programming language itself.
Btw for me persona problem of this replacement is only license switching from strong copy left to permissive, I don't really like this trend it smells really bad from what corps actuality like more nowadays as fear as fire gpl.I don't know who exactly staying behind rust coreutils but devs just ignore all request about GPL or responding very cold or find any other stupid excuse like they don't wanna deal with it. At least they could give their direct point of their views and their motivation about it.but still will not support MIT licence as for main tools for importan core of system
That’s a pretty big problem, I couldn’t care less about the language. But stepping away from GPL is not good at all.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what the worst case scenario is... like, is some company going to get rich off of their proprietary
cpandsudoimplementation that they forked off of an open one?It's one thing when a company gets the benefits of people's contributions and doesn't give back (in the form of source code when they build upon it and at the time they offer binary files). If a company wants to do the work themselves.. well now they don't have too.
GPL promoters typically value software freedom, and may believe it's generally bad for society when software is proprietary. I don't know what coreutlis does but I doubt there's a thoughtful reason to choose MIT license for a clone.
This is what it's all about. We all know this.
Why does it matter to you? If the developers are fine with the license and how the code they write can be used under it, that's their prerogative. You don't lose anything if some company also uses those programs.
What are you expecting them to say? "That's the license we chose for this thing we're allowing you to use for free. Use it or don't, we don't care"? They have no obligation to justify themselves to you.
What do you mean by support? Would be be donating money to the developers if the license was different? The developers don't get anything from you using their code.
I understand the sentiment.
The move to a permissive license opens the door for these tools to possibly become closed source one day.
Why is that a problem if the developers are apparently fine with it?
Everyone can still use the open source version/fork. It could only become a problem if distributions for some reason decided to use that closed source version, which doesn't make any sense.
I fail to see a worst case scenario here beyond companies being able to profit from the software as well.
You know that you can change license of software that you own copyright to? You can take GPL code and change it to something else, but you can’t un-GPL existing released code. It’s the same thing with MIT.
The only people bound by the license are people who use it because it is licensed to them.
The difference is that organisation may develop MIT software without publishing their code.
That's a bit short-sighted. On the level of the individual project you are right, it's the dev's choice. And I think permissive licenses also have a place with security critical software like crypto libraries, where everyone benefits from secure libraries being used as much as possible, even in proprietary software.
But on an ecosystem level, this trend to permissive licensing is very worrying, because if it reaches a critical mass, it opens us up to EEE scenarios. Android is already bad enough, only made bearable by Google having to release much of the source code. Imagine what it would be like today if Google had succeeded with their Fuchsia efforts. So we should at least be wary and give a little pushback to this trend. It's valid to question if everything under the sun has to be rewritten and if it does, why does it have to be permissive licensing? What's the end goal?
Why would something that hasn't reached sufficient test coverage, or that fails one of the most common test suites around, be put into one of the largest distros around, lts version or not? It's honestly ridiculous
To test it. That's the whole reason why the 6 months releases between the LTS releases in Ubuntu exists.
No... This revisionism to defend canonical is nonsense. LTS releases don't promise the most recent releases of software, but they promise security and stability updates for longer, so they are more suitable for servers and users who don't want to worry about breaking changes often.
That's it. The releases between Long Term SERVICE releases are production ready and not testing releases. They are recommended for most people.
https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
Key words "production quality". This sure doesn't seem "production quality" to me.
There's still a few weeks until 25.10 releases. If its still issues by release time I'm sure that they'll either delay the 25.10 release (as they have done in the past) or pause the
coreutils-rsrollout and stick to GNU Coreutils for this release.Furthermore, 25.10 is a short-term release that exists as a preview for 26.04. 25.10 will receive security patches for nine months. 26.04, as an LTS, will receive security patches for up to 12 years (most of which are paid). Nobody should be seriously migrating to 25.10.
If coreutils-rs does get into the official release of 25.10 and totally tanks it, well, that's what short-term releases are for.
We shall hope so.
A few tests failing in beta, when this can be fixed before the release, is hardly newsworthy.
However it leaves a bad taste to even consider replacing coreutils when it's nur clear that the replacement is rock solid. Those commands are used in millions of shell scripts distributed alongside applications. Should coreutils break, we'd learn the hard way.
Yes you're must likely correct. I was simply pushing back on the other poster talking like ubuntu releases other than lts are unstable/testing releases. They are intended to be stable and usable, which is certainly not the case if they include the core utils replacement as it currently stands.
A test and benchmark suite from Phoronix is not production. Canonical tested software before in short term supported versions, before they include it in long term. And there was occasions when they reverted back. Production quality is a vague term. Compared to daily development releases, the interim releases are production quality.
I am not defending mistakes, I am setting expectations.
A test suite from phoronix having issues is certainly enough of a canary in the coalmine that this stuff is not ready for showtime. You have been saying that non-lts ubuntu releases are basically unstable releases but that has never been the intent and is not even what they say.
The non-LTS versions are unstable by definition and that's the goal; to be unstable. And no, I am not talking about buggy stability type, but more like "unchanging, reliable". In example changing Wayland by default or back then from Unity to GNOME 3 would only happen in a non-LTS version, because that is a huge change and need to be "tested" before LTS commitment. That does not mean Canonical doesn't care about quality, but that is not the biggest goal with the in between releases. Its like Beta, a current snapshot of the development.
Canonical can state what they want, the history, actions and results are what is important. What do you think is the reason Canonical does the non LTS releases?
Damn bruh, I didn't know that too.
Sure, but everybody is aware that roughly 30% of the Internet run on
ubuntu:latestand well, that will move to 25.10 soon.And yes, nobody should do this, using a latest tag for docker builds, but everybody does it ... So ....
25.10 isn't on the main upgrade path. Serious users migrate to the new LTS every two years, and very serious users pay for the twelve-year support plan.