Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils

Re:Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils by lionkor on Thursday April 24, 2025 @02:21AM (#43779803)

That's the worst idea I've seen in a while. People rely on the behaviors of the GNU coreutils, this is going to break a lot of stuff. The uutils are not there yet at all.

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Re:Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils by turtleyacht on Thursday April 24, 2025 @03:51AM (#43780213)

If this rewrite is indicative of other rewrites, we'll see a license change from GPL [1] to MIT.

"Differences with GNU are treated as bugs." - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils#goals

That's promising. Wouldn't it be annoying though, to have to keep things bug-for-bug compatible on a green-field project? That priority may be the first compromise, and divergence is inevitable.

(If few report edge cases and there's no fuzzing.)

[1] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils?tab=GPL-3.0-1-ov-file

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Re:Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils by whatagreatboy on Thursday April 24, 2025 @02:24AM (#43779819)

I think this is a good experiment. 25.10 is not an LTS, people who want stability are using LTS anyway.

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Re:Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils by TickleSteve on Thursday April 24, 2025 @02:42AM (#43779892)

Correct me if I'm wrong but the next LTS will be 26.04 which would give them 6 months to get maturity and stability... For such an important set of utilities, that seems unlikely.

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Re:Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils by matheusmoreira on Thursday April 24, 2025 @02:34AM (#43779864)

And one day people will rely on the behaviors of other things. There's no reason those things can't be these Rust utilities, they just need feature parity. Hopefully they will surpass their GNU equivalents. They'll probably be easier to contribute to as well.

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