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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

The rewrite in Rust is mostly vanity and marketing but not based on a real technical need...

So I don't see why they would want to do that.

Canonical's usage of uutils is likely for marketing. But the codebase itself was developed for fun, as an excuse for people to have a hands-on way to learn Rust back before Rust was even released, with a minor justification as being cross-platform. From the original README in 2013:

Why?

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Many GNU, linux and other utils are pretty awesome, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to windows. However those projects are either old, abandonned, hosted on CVS, written in platform-specific C, etc.

Rust provides a good platform-agnostic way of writing systems utils that are easy to compile anywhere, and this is as good a way as any to try and learn it.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/9653ed81a2fbf393f42...

>Canonical's usage of uutils is likely for marketing

Currently their usage is actively worsening the security of their distro

These things were caught and basically all of them weren't covered by any test suite (not even GNU coreutils'). It's a bit bold to claim that it's actively worsening it when it's not an LTS.

That's generally what you call introducing new semantic bugs.

> It's a bit bold to claim that it's actively worsening it when it's not an LTS.

It is LTS now. And not LTS releases are releases.

Welcome to building something new.

New things can be made optional and tested outside production, and should not be rolled out in an LTS edition.

>> should not be rolled out in an LTS edition.

The Rust coreutils were first rolled out in the previous release which was not LTS:

https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-25-10-q...

That was for 6 months only and in an intermediate version that many don't update to, especially in production environments.

Isn't this how Kernighan and late Ritchie (K&R) ended up with unix and C?

Honestly, brilliant guys.

When C got its own standards committee they even rejected Ritchie's proposal to add fat pointers to C before it was too late to add them. Instead, we got the C abstract machine.

I thought it was a learning exercise, and maybe some corporations also like it because it has more permissive licensing.

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