certainly! I didn't say otherwise.

however once software that has been only rewritten for the sake of being written in Rust starts affecting large distributions like Ubuntu, that's a different issue...

however one could argue that Ubuntu picking up the brand new Rust based coreutils instead of the old one is a 2nd order effect of "let's rewrite everything in Rust, whether it makes sense of not"

So rewrites in Rust can happen as long as they don't have practical usage?

This isn't something that affected Ubuntu. It's something Ubuntu wanted to test in day to day usage.

ideally stupid rewrites never happen, but alas...

Iirc it started as simple exercise. It just aimed at high compatibility with original coreutils.

Which part of that is stupid? License is chosen because Rust is more static linkage friendly. Which leaves exercise part or high compatibility.

You might as well say Linux is a stupid rewrite that will never achieve anything circa 1998.

what purpose does the new coreutils serve other than being written in Rust?

Nobody - least of all the authors of uutils - is forcing Ubuntu to adopt this change. I personally feel like it's a pretty radical step on Ubuntu's part, but they are free to make such choices, and you are free to not use Ubuntu if you believe it is detrimental.

There's no "however" here. Rewriting anything in Rust has no effect on anybody by itself.

Yes, people are allowed to do stupid things, but other people are also allowed to call them out on those stupid things. Especially if they make other people's lives harder, like in this case.

Whether it’s “stupid” remains to be seen. I personally would not have made this choice at this point in time, but the way some people seem to consider “Rust program has a bug” to be newsworthy is… odd.

> but the way some people seem to consider “Rust program has a bug” to be newsworthy is… odd.

But the fact that program X was written in Rust is, on the other hand, newsworthy? And there is nothing odd in the fact that the first property of the software that is advertised is the fact that it was made in Rust.

Yeah, nothing odd there.

> to consider “Rust program has a bug” to be newsworthy is… odd.

That's not why it is newsworthy though.

"A project reimplementing core OS programs for the sake of reimplementing in the favourite language breaks stable OS", is what makes it newsworthy.

Having unimplemented features makes a thing stupid?

Rewriting already perfectly working and feature-complete software and advertising your version as a superior replacement while neglecting to implement existing features that users relied on is pretty stupid, yes.

Need I remind you what coreutils or Linux (re)implement?

Replacing a program which implements these features and is a core foundation of the OS, which one that doesn't, to mock people not using the latest language is.