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Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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This is such bad take only because it singles out rust for some weird reason. Tool total rewrites take work regardless of language
I like tool rewrites. But fixing major issues just before it is used in so many systems? It’s irresponsible.
It should of been given more time to mature. And Ubuntu is used so much, even the odd versions of it, that if one thing goes wrong later; this will cause a lot of bad press for both Rust and Ubuntu.
It should make the rust community very nervous. So many companies use the Ubuntu:latest tag in so many projects. And millions of people will hear, after being subject to the breakages, that it was all about Rust. Even though it’s not about Rust, just bad management
I mostly agree.
However, Ubuntu clearly sees 24.10 as the test bed for 25.04 and this is how they get the software tested. That is up to them.
I think also that, if you make a change this big, and only a couple of minor bugs are found and fixed before release, you are in pretty good shape.
And if all bugs are fixed this fast, even bugs found after release may impact only a few.
They have provided a mechanism to use the old utils if you want to be more conservative. Given that, I do not find this “irresponsible”.
There are probably bigger bugs elsewhere in 24.10 right now that will be harder to mitigate.
Oh, it's not the language. It's the type of people who not only like Rust, but have a compulsion / need / fixation on re-writing existing tools. They say it's so it's more secure, but honestly it's so they can apply their own opinions of how the tool should be. They always promise to make it a drop in replacement, but then then get rid of options, or change what they do... they can't help themselves. And that is the kind of people who volunteer to port tools to Rust. If they would stick to true 1:1 replacement, this wouldn't be an issue.
Are there other types of people? Writing software to be bug-for-bug compatible with something else is really difficult and, yes, not fun at all. You will not find many people looking to volunteer for that...