Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables

a year ago by BCBoy911 to c/linux

thingsiplay 82 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19612878, hotness: undefined, score: 82, children: 26

anon5621 45 points a year ago

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

path: 0 19612878 19612909, hotness: undefined, score: 45, children: 11

m33 39 points a year ago

That’s a pretty big problem, I couldn’t care less about the language. But stepping away from GPL is not good at all.

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19612923, hotness: undefined, score: 39, children: 0

chaos 6 points a year ago

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?

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19614942, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 2

tabular 9 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19614942 19616081, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0

majster 1 point a year ago

Apple is ok with GPLv2 Bash. Linux kernel is GPLv2, GNU coreutils are GPLv3. Systemd is curiosly also GPLv2. Striping GNU out of GNU/Linux might not be so innocent.

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19614942 19738458, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

snikta 1 point a year ago

This is what it's all about. We all know this.

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19621944, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

lol -15 points a year ago

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19613205, hotness: undefined, score: -15, children: 5

axum 21 points a year ago

I understand the sentiment.

The move to a permissive license opens the door for these tools to possibly become closed source one day.

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19613205 19614260, hotness: undefined, score: 21, children: 3

custard_swollower 2 points a year ago

You know that you can change license of software that you own copyright to? You can take GPL code and change it to something else, but you can’t un-GPL existing released code. It’s the same thing with MIT.

The only people bound by the license are people who use it because it is licensed to them.

The difference is that organisation may develop MIT software without publishing their code.

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19613205 19614260 19623069, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

lol -2 points a year ago

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19613205 19614260 19639374, hotness: undefined, score: -2, children: 1

Obin 8 points a year ago

Why does it matter to you? If the developers are fine with the license and how the code they write can be used under it, that’s their prerogative.

That's a bit short-sighted. On the level of the individual project you are right, it's the dev's choice. And I think permissive licenses also have a place with security critical software like crypto libraries, where everyone benefits from secure libraries being used as much as possible, even in proprietary software.

But on an ecosystem level, this trend to permissive licensing is very worrying, because if it reaches a critical mass, it opens us up to EEE scenarios. Android is already bad enough, only made bearable by Google having to release much of the source code. Imagine what it would be like today if Google had succeeded with their Fuchsia efforts. So we should at least be wary and give a little pushback to this trend. It's valid to question if everything under the sun has to be rewritten and if it does, why does it have to be permissive licensing? What's the end goal?

path: 0 19612878 19612909 19613205 19616789, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0

Feyd 27 points a year ago

path: 0 19612878 19614517, hotness: undefined, score: 27, children: 10

thingsiplay 14 points a year ago

To test it. That's the whole reason why the 6 months releases between the LTS releases in Ubuntu exists.

path: 0 19612878 19614517 19614687, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 9

Feyd 23 points a year ago

path: 0 19612878 19614517 19614687 19614996, hotness: undefined, score: 23, children: 7

BCBoy911 18 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19612878 19614517 19614687 19614996 19615785, hotness: undefined, score: 18, children: 3

thingsiplay 2 points a year ago

A test and benchmark suite from Phoronix is not production. Canonical tested software before in short term supported versions, before they include it in long term. And there was occasions when they reverted back. Production quality is a vague term. Compared to daily development releases, the interim releases are production quality.

I am not defending mistakes, I am setting expectations.

path: 0 19612878 19614517 19614687 19614996 19615121, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2

3abas 12 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19612878 19614517 19614687 19620033, hotness: undefined, score: 12, children: 0

vapeloki 7 points a year ago

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 ....

path: 0 19612878 19613962, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 1

caseyweederman 3 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19612878 19613962 19619714, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0

Obnomus 2 points a year ago

Damn bruh, I didn't know that too.

path: 0 19612878 19622260, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

snikta 36 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19622009, hotness: undefined, score: 36, children: 1

Flax_vert 1 point a year ago

Make sure it's all powered by the cloud

path: 0 19622009 19627394, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

atzanteol 28 points a year ago

New software has bugs??

path: 0 19612548, hotness: undefined, score: 28, children: 0

arty 23 points a year ago

I will really appreciate the irony when it turns out that it’s the new implementation in Rust that is correct

path: 0 19617660, hotness: undefined, score: 23, children: 4

LeFantome 24 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19617660 19619910, hotness: undefined, score: 24, children: 2

MonkderVierte 5 points a year ago

If you pipe, dd is the wrong tool anyway. Replace with cp or cat. dd is a fine scalpel but a bad shovel.

Useless use of dd

path: 0 19617660 19619910 19623210, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1

eutampieri 10 points a year ago

In both these cases, dd serves 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 replace dd with the functionally equivalent cat: cat /dev/sda | pv | cat > /dev/sdb

😂

path: 0 19617660 19619910 19623210 19623946, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 0

limer 1 point a year ago

path: 0 19617660 19619151, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

pr06lefs 16 points a year ago

Glad to see someone's working the bugs out.

path: 0 19612723, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 0

cornshark 13 points a year ago

The bug: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/8750

path: 0 19617965, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 2

LeFantome 18 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19617965 19620461, hotness: undefined, score: 18, children: 1

WhyJiffie 10 points a year ago

I don't think it's anti-Rust. I like Rust. I don't like the uutils license.

path: 0 19617965 19620461 19625635, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 0

umbrella 10 points a year ago

path: 0 19628877, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 0

drspod 8 points a year ago

path: 0 19613380, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0

yggstyle 2 points a year ago

Related and sane response:

(Low Level) https://youtu.be/Jgq551IhquA?t=4m7s

path: 0 19654320, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

humanspiral -1 points a year ago

There seems to be a bug in rust md5 implementation. This can break everything, but then everything can soon be fixed too.

path: 0 19617581, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 1

cornshark 7 points a year ago

Looks like md5 is fine, it's dd that's wrong

path: 0 19617581 19617974, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 0

the_q -6 points a year ago

path: 0 19613182, hotness: undefined, score: -6, children: 2

thingsiplay 2 points a year ago

If you rely on a bug, it becomes a feature.

path: 0 19613182 19618079, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

racketlauncher831 1 point a year ago

Dude, they feature a main bug to kill off all those other bugs.

path: 0 19613182 19632734, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

corsicanguppy -7 points a year ago

I can hear the goalposts moving.

path: 0 19614856, hotness: undefined, score: -7, children: 0

just_another_person -7 points a year ago

Durrrrrr

path: 0 19612302, hotness: undefined, score: -7, children: 0

savvywolf -11 points a year ago

I'm willing to bet that if the GNU coreutils getting bumped a minor version caused widespread issues for a day, nobody would even bother reporting in it...

path: 0 19622735, hotness: undefined, score: -11, children: 6

pastermil 6 points a year ago

Can you point to an instance that actually happened?

path: 0 19622735 19623754, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0

Magnum 4 points a year ago

path: 0 19622735 19622942, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 4

savvywolf 3 points a year ago

... Yeah? Beta software having bugs isn't the hottest of takes.

path: 0 19622735 19622942 19623353, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 3

neclimdul 4 points a year ago

Minor releases aren't beta. By any convention they should be fully tested, final releases. And if gnu core utils broke systems in a minor release you better believe it would make it to some news.
The instability of choosing a beta software for the literal core of your operating system is kind of the point.

path: 0 19622735 19622942 19623353 19626235, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 2

savvywolf 4 points a year ago

Ubuntu 25.10 entered beta on September 18th. It releases on October 9th. It's still in beta.

path: 0 19622735 19622942 19623353 19626235 19627681, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 1

PseudoSpock -30 points a year ago

I warned ya. Rust folks never make a true 1:1 replacement. They have to tweek it. Always.

path: 0 19613565, hotness: undefined, score: -30, children: 8

axum 45 points a year ago

This is such bad take only because it singles out rust for some weird reason. Tool total rewrites take work regardless of language

path: 0 19613565 19614292, hotness: undefined, score: 45, children: 4

limer -1 points a year ago

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

path: 0 19613565 19614292 19619422, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 1

LeFantome 2 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19613565 19614292 19619422 19628853, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

PseudoSpock -7 points a year ago

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.

path: 0 19613565 19614292 19615371, hotness: undefined, score: -7, children: 1

Ephera 16 points a year ago

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...

path: 0 19613565 19614292 19615371 19615686, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 0

trevor 13 points a year ago

This type of comment is indistinguishable from the low-tier, rage bait comments under every Phoronix article.

path: 0 19613565 19614280, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 1

PseudoSpock -4 points a year ago

This isn't a rage bait comment. Show me one Rust tool replacement made that didn't alter functionality in some way, causing edge cases, and sometimes even mainline usage, to break and scripts have to be written to accommodate. I've not seen it yet. If you have, I will gladly stand corrected. The language is great, it's the programmers at issue.

path: 0 19613565 19614280 19615404, hotness: undefined, score: -4, children: 0

LeFantome 1 point a year ago

It has not even released yet.

Is your claim that non-Rust software gets written and runs perfectly without bugs the first time it is run, never requiring you to “tweek it”? That does not seem strongly evidence based. I assume by tweek, you mean tweak.

Also, they fixed this bug before this story, and your well researched comment, even appeared. The same thing happened just a few days ago when a similar “performance” bug was found. An entire chorus of idiots, including some prominent YouTubers, proudly proclaimed “I warned ya” for that one as well. Many predicting Ubuntu would need to be delayed or that people would be switching to other distros. Of course, the Rust version was already 50% faster than the C version by then and it was still weeks before the release date. Those comments did not age well.

And here we are again.

If you were trying to sound smart, it did not work.

path: 0 19613565 19627967, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

linux

@lemmy.ml

login for more options

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

go to feed...

linux

@lemmy.ml

login for more options

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

go to feed...