Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
14 points by rajtilakjee
14 points by rajtilakjee
I'm not convinced a Rust-based coreutils is that much of a win, but all things equal, I'd pick a Rust one (for the usual reasons).
Of course, all things aren't equal: GNU Coreutils has a great track record, and, ~never causes me issues?
That is the nature of some change however, and so it's a benefit to the community that Canonical are paving this path, and a big win for Canonical in particular.
Canonical will build more in-house experience with Rust and Linux fundamentals, and advertise themselves as an employer for that.
Canonical are now on a path to being able to remove GNU Coreutils from their 15 year support package. When you provide 15y support for a package, you become defacto maintainer of a fork.
Without Rust Coreutils, in the 2040s, Canonical would be paying an engineer to backport patches to a 15yo fork. For typical reasons, I expect they're keen to do that in Rust. Their experience with 26.06 LTS will help them decide whether to include GNU Coreutils in 28.06 LTS (and onwards). They might even get the confidence to remove GNU Coreutils from 26.06 LTS in the 2020s or 2030s.