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Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables
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canonical doing canonical things
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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New non-copyleft Rust implementation. While we're at it, let's throw in some blockchain and AI as well. The eccentric South African billionaire CEO will be pleased.
Make sure it's all powered by the cloud
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 cp and sudo implementation 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.
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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
Every six months between LTS versions, Canonical publishes an interim release of Ubuntu, with 25.04 being the latest example. These are production-quality releases and are supported for 9 months, with sufficient time provided for users to update, but these releases do not receive the long-term commitment of LTS releases.
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-rs rollout 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.
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Damn bruh, I didn't know that too.
Sure, but everybody is aware that roughly 30% of the Internet run on ubuntu:latest and 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.
I will really appreciate the irony when it turns out that it’s the new implementation in Rust that is correct
GNU is really its own thing and not reallyPOSIX anymore. So GNU is right even if they are wrong.
This is not me advocating for GNU. I use BSD utils myself.
On this issue, your were right in a way. My understanding is that the uutils version of dd was respecting the fullblock parameter, causing problems on slow pipes. GNU ignore this and was doing partial writes. Uutils has been modified to match GNU and is “working” now. At least, a tested patch has been submitted.
If you pipe, dd is the wrong tool anyway. Replace with cp or cat. dd is a fine scalpel but a bad shovel.
In both these cases,
ddserves no real purpose. It’s purely a superstitious charm trying to ensure safe passage of the data. You can see how silly this is when you replaceddwith the functionally equivalentcat:cat /dev/sda | pv | cat > /dev/sdb
😂
And……fixed.
A few days ago we had a “performance” bug. Before the stories had even been written, the uutils was made 50% faster than GNU.
Now we have an actual difference in behaviour. But it is again fixed before the stories could even go out.
The anti-Rust crew is really trying to celebrate hear but it seems like uutils is proving them wrong so far.
We will see what happens in production I suppose.
I don't think it's anti-Rust. I like Rust. I don't like the uutils license.
New software has bugs??
Glad to see someone's working the bugs out.
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