I really don't understand why Canonical rushes this. If 'rm' can't remove all possible directory entries, that is a big issue:
$ podman run --rm -it ubuntu:26.10
$ apt update -y; apt upgrade -y
$ rm --version
rm (uutils coreutils) 0.10.0
$ gnumkdir -p $(yes a/ | head -n $((32 * 1024)) | tr -d '\n')
$ rm -rf a
Segmentation fault (core dumped) rm -rf a
$ ls a
a
$ gnurm -rf a
$ ls a
ls: cannot access 'a': No such file or directory
teekert 14 hours ago [-]
Rush? This is an interim release (95% or so only tracks LTS's) that is not even out yet... Go file a bug reports if you have some time.
mixmastamyk 13 hours ago [-]
I did, and the original dev of the component fixed it within a few days. It was straightforward, a backwards reading of a spec, reordered.
The fix is still sitting unmerged many months later.
This surprised me since I thought the project was in heavy bugfix/compat mode. I won’t touch it until I see some velocity on open bugs.
collinfunk 14 hours ago [-]
I have. It has been an open bug upstream for years as well.
teekert 14 hours ago [-]
ok, that's concerning, if you post it here I'll vote for it (after confirming).
jeffbee 13 hours ago [-]
Reporting bugs before Ubuntu releases has never worked for me. They always land a bunch of major changes after the supposed "freeze" then they ignore all feedback because of the freeze. It's infuriating.
collinfunk 13 hours ago [-]
Glad to hear that I am not alone. I feel like launchpad is totally ignored most of the time.
To get a response on a buggy GNU coreutils patch of theirs [1], I had to mention it in a rust-coreutils bug months later...
Yes, please. Linux distros is better with macos approach. And making appimage first class makes a lot of sense.
petre 1 minutes ago [-]
I'll avoid it qt thispoint ayway. The Rust coreutils is another reason for that. Snap, monetizing updates, telemetry, enough is enough.
Flatpak is good enough, I guess.
dark-star 14 hours ago [-]
yeah, this is a bug. And yes, it should be fixed. But I don't think it will affect many users, I mean who has a 32000 -evels deep directory on their system?
tosti 12 hours ago [-]
What programmer or programming language can't iterate a loop more than 32000 times?!
Ygg2 12 hours ago [-]
When triaging an issue you have to prioritise. Do you fix a problem that affects 2-3 people or one that may affect thousands?
IshKebab 12 hours ago [-]
It's a stack overflow which means it's using recursion and for historical reasons that don't make sense any more, stacks are teeny tiny on 64-bit Linux - apparently only 8 MB on Linux! I'm not sure why they don't raise it to something reasonable like 4 GB. I guess because they want consistency with 32-bit? Maybe we can finally change it if/when they phase out support for 32-bit Linux. Apparently it might not be that far away:
8MB is the default per-thread stack size from glibc, also seems to be the default "ulimit" from pam or the kernel, I'm not sure. So for the main/default thread (or if not using threads) the process can use setrlimit() and for threads it can use pthread_attr_setstacksize() to get bigger stacks if it knows it may need them.
8MB is pretty huge though; musl libc is famous for defaulting to much smaller per-thread stack size of 128KB (to avoid over-committing lots of memory when there are many threads - the main dev is really principled/opinionated on this topic, but again there are a few ways for applications to explicitly size their stacks as large as they need). Linux kernel threads get a bit less than 16KB!
tosti 12 hours ago [-]
OIC. Rust doesn't guarantee optimizing tail recursion. How unfortunate for a language that's getting widespread adoption.
gpm 11 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth there's reasonably active [1] work on implementing opt-in guaranteed tail calls - but it's not particularly fast going. LLVM (the backend rust uses) needs better support for musttail (e.g. some architectures just don't support it [2]).
By-default guaranteed tail calls really isn't rust's style, because it means subtle changes (introducing a destructor, re-ordering code, etc) can change semantics without you realizing it. If you want to guarantee that a call can't allocate a new stack frame you should have to say it.
jmalicki 2 hours ago [-]
> because it means subtle changes (introducing a destructor, re-ordering code, etc) can change semantics without you realizing it.
No, it won't change semantics - if you say @musttail or similar, it will simply fail to compile if you, say, introduce a destructor - the semantics will not subtly change.
Uh, yes, if you guarantee the semantics only when the code explicitly opts in and not by default then semantics will not subtly change, that is the point of my comment
jmalicki 1 hours ago [-]
It's not a change in semantics of compiled code. It is only a change of whether or not the code will compile.
lioeters 11 hours ago [-]
Not so familiar with this area, but isn't the existing behavior of implicitly creating new stacks more of a problem than implicit tail-call elimination? Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same.
But I can understand the preference for an explicit opt-in, to make clear that it is enforced and not assumed.
gpm 10 hours ago [-]
> implicitly creating new stacks
I'd argue that it's explicit - that's what a function call does and you don't have implicit function calls in rust.
> Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same.
What you're asking for here already exists. Tail calls might be optimized into not allocating extra stack frames, the rust compiler just doesn't guarantee that it will perform that optimization (and almost certainly won't when code is compiled without optimizations... for instance).
What people want is the semantic guarantee that the stack frame won't be allocated. Not just a compiler that often performs the optimization. Otherwise you can't be sure that your code will keep working with new compiler flags/versions/architectures/... You could say "whenever the code is the right shape we'll guarantee the optimization" (C++ famously did this for things like copy elision)... but now the shape of code comes with non-obvious semantic guarantees and that's not rust's style. Hence the proposal for a keyword instead.
lioeters 10 hours ago [-]
I see it, certain algorithms need guaranteed tail-call elimination, otherwise they are too inefficient and must be manually unrolled or rewritten to avoid blowing the stack. So a compiler optimization that is "nice to have" is not good enough.
clhodapp 60 minutes ago [-]
No algorithm requires tail-call elimination in a general-purpose language with imperative mutability. It's just another way to express iteration.
IshKebab 7 hours ago [-]
Do any widely used languages guarantee tail call optimization? It's a pretty niche feature.
gpm 7 hours ago [-]
Scala, ocaml, racket, clojure, zig.
For recursion only kotlin.
(For most of these only with syntax specifying it)
secondcoming 14 hours ago [-]
That way of thinking just means it'll never be fixed
abirch 14 hours ago [-]
"The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it."
Linus Torvalds
dfox 13 hours ago [-]
The problem there is that this is exactly the class of bug that does not exist in GNU coreutils because of philosophy of that project. Non-existence of such bugs proves that the impementation is not copied from AT&T code.
gpm 14 hours ago [-]
Nah, people should (and do) fix small issues as well as big issues. Lying about the scale of issues and calling them "big" when they aren't just leads to no ability to prioritize or evaluate.
Incidentally someone submitted a PR for this issue about 3 hours before the first comment about it in this thread - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/14554 (and 2 hours before this link was submitted to HN)
7bit 14 hours ago [-]
What approach would you suggest for priorisation of tickets?
mrkdkirlwkfkf 50 minutes ago [-]
Capitalism.
secondcoming 13 hours ago [-]
Ideally there should have been no tickets at all if all that's happening is a program being ported to another language.
gpm 13 hours ago [-]
This isn't a port - it's a re-implementation without any use of the original source.
That's also not all that's happening. It's also making improvements like better internalization support, better error messages, and a small handful of other extensions.
collinfunk 13 hours ago [-]
I have had to tell them repeatedly to stop copying tests verbatim, including the original comments from GNU coreutils. So I doubt this is true, which is frustrating.
IshKebab 12 hours ago [-]
I mean, that should work... but you can see why that would be considered low priority right?
Malakun 14 hours ago [-]
You can use coreutils-from-gnu instead uutils. However since 26.04 build-essential depends on coreutils-from-uutils, it cannot be upgraded while coreutils-from-gnu is installed.
But it's clear that Ubuntu will remove coreutils, genuine sudo and other tools from the future versions. It's the direction, it's ideological and thus nor merit nor our feedback will change anything here.
lioeters 10 hours ago [-]
> genuine sudo
That made me curious, it sounds related to this:
Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords - 5 months ago (413 comments)
You can use equivs to create a dummy coreutils-from-uutils package, as mentioned in the responses to that report.
It is frustrating that Canonical has no interest in fixing it, though. It makes it hard to take their claims seriously that you can still use GNU coreutils if you want.
Arcuru 13 hours ago [-]
Has the code quality in that repo gotten to a good point then? I haven't followed it much, but last I looked[1] (which was a few years ago) almost every tool I looked at in detail had pretty bad performance or correctness issues.
You weren't kidding: it was exactly 4 years ago ("September 13, 2022").
egorfine 13 hours ago [-]
The reason for existence of uutils is ideological, not technical. Thus code quality is of no use for the objective.
stouset 12 hours ago [-]
I’m a huge proponent of Rust and generally lean a lot closer to the RIIR mentality than most, but this effort seems to be such a waste of effort and resources.
There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs.
By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
egorfine 12 hours ago [-]
Same here. Love Rust. Hate rust rewrites.
tcfhgj 4 hours ago [-]
I bet you don't know the reason for existence
dsign 53 minutes ago [-]
Hmm, this doesn’t make sense. You simply don’t replace utilities with many decades of maturity and that “just work” with something that is not as mature. It will open all users of the distro to all sorts of subtle and not so subtle bugs. I for one don’t want to find myself staring at a mysterious segfault when I want to build the latest version of nodejs or flash a microcontroller. It’s such a pity; I have used Ubuntu for close to 23 years.
someothherguyy 9 minutes ago [-]
then install the other tool. no one is holding a gun to your head. it isn't windows.
hk1337 13 hours ago [-]
Was there something wrong with how they are currently written or do they just want the badge that says they converted to Rust?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1 hours ago [-]
License. GNU is copyleft and the new thing is permissive.
We might see a fracture open slowly. For me, even AGPL is not enough
zahlman 59 minutes ago [-]
Once they have a more permissive license, cui bono?
goodpoint 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
phendrenad2 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mid-kid 13 hours ago [-]
Ubuntu started out with a slogan claiming "linux for human beings", and it kept that reputation for well over a decade, with a heavy focus on the desktop.
You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
m4rtink 12 hours ago [-]
Cool aspirations but I don't think it has significant enterprise deployments compared to RHEL or SLES.
FWIW, Canonical did not reach out to any of us who maintain GNU coreutils before, after, or during the transition. Had we known, we could have easily warned them about the incompatibilities.
teekert 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, shouldn't have called it legacy, perhaps OG would have been more appropriate.
egorfine 13 hours ago [-]
> Ubuntu devs have been nothing but good FOSS citizens
They have forced systemd despite feedback and genuine concerns.
They have forced fake sudo and uutils the same way.
So, ideology over merit. That doesn't mean that all of the Ubuntu devs are this way, but this means that the company is consistent in its ways to hurt Linux.
fhdkweig 14 hours ago [-]
> Ubuntu devs has been nothing good FOSS
Did you mean nothing "but" good?
teekert 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, sorry and thanx, I played a bit with the sentence, not happy with the first thing I submitted -> Corrected now.
goodpoint 13 hours ago [-]
"nothing good" is more accurate
testdelacc1 14 hours ago [-]
The account you’re replying to has 8 karma across 13 comments in the last 11 years.
The other comments are about as good as the one you replied to.
jmclnx 14 hours ago [-]
Probably true, but the direction Linux is going these days is concerning
bigfishrunning 13 hours ago [-]
It's important to remember that this is a story about Ubuntu, and not Linux, and they are two very different projects with different motivations.
rvz 13 hours ago [-]
It does not matter. Both (Ubuntu [0], and the Linux Kernel [1]) use, build with and in some cases promote using LLMs.
True, and that's a bummer, but it's the decision of the maintainers of those projects to make.
If it goes really sideways, and it may, you can either fork Linux or move away to something like one of the BSDs.
_ink_ 14 hours ago [-]
Care to elaborate?
amiga386 14 hours ago [-]
GPL -> MIT
skrtskrt 14 hours ago [-]
Does this actually matter that much for some tools when the kernel is GPL?
amiga386 13 hours ago [-]
I does. The OP says "Linux" but means "Linux distros", which are made of thousands of "commingled" pieces (i.e. the licence of one piece does not affect the other).
Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
skrtskrt 5 hours ago [-]
In theory there could be a the MIT version relicensed to GPL and this version could be carried as a standard if having MIT software as core utilities was considered enough of a threat - right? You just have to retain original license/attribution.
That would be an awfully awkward move in the realm of Linux-related politics but if having an MIT-licensed coreutils was such an existential thread, at least you can fix it with aggressive license moves and not code.
bigstrat2003 11 hours ago [-]
That doesn't matter. Amazon or whoever can add as much secret sauce as they like; people can freely use the original so there's no issue.
amiga386 10 hours ago [-]
We've balkanized Linux but you're free to use the original (which we are deliberately incompatible with, as is rival #2, rival #3, rival #4, etc. and we're all mutually incompatible with each other)
skrtskrt 5 hours ago [-]
Amazon and other clouds already patch the hell out of Linux, but they don't distribute physical devices with that Linux on it to anyone, so they don't have to deliver source code either.
I am not totally sure I see the actual concern here, that a company is going to sell devices with a really great `find` implementation but not contribute it upstream?
amiga386 3 hours ago [-]
In the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of commercial Unices (SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc.) Every one of them was incompatible with each other, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. They were all competing against each other and all seemed to encourage you to use their proprietary extensions in your software and deliberately fuck over anyone using any other variants.
What it meant was a headache for writing platform-agnostic software. It was not a productive way to create software.
Replacing GPL software with MIT software just encourages this behaviour to come back. We already see it with how macOS userland took FreeBSD and sprinkled incompatibilities everywhere.
testdelacc1 14 hours ago [-]
“Concerning” is just a right wing thing to say. They get the habit from Musk. They say it and don’t elaborate, so it kinda operates like a dog whistle.
teekert 14 hours ago [-]
Great "elaboration" (actually it's an "example"), indeed pulling everything into the political dimension is one of the concerning things regarding anything Linux nowadays, imho. Next up: DHH!
qwj18 13 hours ago [-]
1) Corporate forced slop acceptance by e.g. Linus and Debian.
2) Seeing how bad the Linux kernel is with all the AI CVEs. It will get worse.
BSD is the future.
bigfishrunning 13 hours ago [-]
Netcraft may confirm that some day
germandiago 13 hours ago [-]
BSD is the future. Wishful thinking. Nothing bad about it, but chances are low.
Ss for AI slop. There is lots, but I do not think Linus will tolerate a heavy quality degradation and policies will be set up to strike a good balance.
jmclnx 10 hours ago [-]
You were down voted, odd. But this I fully agree with, the latest thing for me is Wayland being forced upon us.
skrtskrt 5 hours ago [-]
X11 and everything around it is unfixable security hazard slop, just slop that was painstakingly created by humans.
Also Wayland is it being forced on us? I have plenty of coworkers that run X daily because they are still afraid of the Wayland boogeyman despite the fact that their supposed clipboard and screen sharing problems in Wayland (the only two supposed problems they can name) have been solved for years.
14 hours ago [-]
blastonico 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
theandrewbailey 12 hours ago [-]
I went upstream and started using Debian instead. Don't listen to the haters: it updates at about the same frequency as Ubuntu LTS.
stonogo 13 hours ago [-]
Or just use Arch, and skip the pointless hype squad
wojciii 13 hours ago [-]
Funny .. Arch started growing on me.
rvz 13 hours ago [-]
Or Pop!_OS that does not vibe slop their distro.
tuananh 13 hours ago [-]
you are being sarcastic right?
bithammerthunde 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dralley 14 hours ago [-]
The project was started long before LLMs existed.
asrk-qlwu 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
perarneng 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
stouset 12 hours ago [-]
There have been twelve CVEs reported against coreutils in the past twenty years.
There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit.
I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
Ygg2 11 hours ago [-]
> There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit.
Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
stouset 8 hours ago [-]
It doesn’t even matter. The sheer disparity in vulnerabilities over twenty years versus one year is impossible to hand-wave away.
We are talking about fourfold more CVEs over a twentyfold reduction in time.
gpm 6 hours ago [-]
It really does matter. I don't know enough about this specific case, but multiple order of magnitude differences in CVE numbers are frequently explained by different policies towards finding and assigning CVEs in many many cases.
Absent more information the default should be to hand wave it away as probably such a difference. CVE counts are not a even slightly reliable metric.
collinfunk 4 hours ago [-]
Most of them are TOCTOU races or improperly following symbolic links. For example, uutils mkfifo(1) would create a world-readable and writable FIFO before using chmod(2) to restrict its permissions. Another user could replace that file with a symbolic link between the mkfifo(3) call and the chmod(2) to change the permissions of arbitrary files [1].
Other ones I find concerning are that you could also bypass '-- no-preserve-root' with a symbolic link to root [2]. Or by using paths equivalent to "/", e.g., "/../" [3]. Historically, GNU coreutils has been pretty good with symbolic links and avoiding TOCTOU races. The only notable one I can remember is a chmod(1) bug [4].
I agree with your general point that the number of CVEs is a useless metric, though.
The fix is still sitting unmerged many months later.
This surprised me since I thought the project was in heavy bugfix/compat mode. I won’t touch it until I see some velocity on open bugs.
To get a response on a buggy GNU coreutils patch of theirs [1], I had to mention it in a rust-coreutils bug months later...
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/coreutils/+bug/215...
Flatpak is good enough, I guess.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1035727/
8MB is pretty huge though; musl libc is famous for defaulting to much smaller per-thread stack size of 128KB (to avoid over-committing lots of memory when there are many threads - the main dev is really principled/opinionated on this topic, but again there are a few ways for applications to explicitly size their stacks as large as they need). Linux kernel threads get a bit less than 16KB!
[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/112788
[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/153827
By-default guaranteed tail calls really isn't rust's style, because it means subtle changes (introducing a destructor, re-ordering code, etc) can change semantics without you realizing it. If you want to guarantee that a call can't allocate a new stack frame you should have to say it.
No, it won't change semantics - if you say @musttail or similar, it will simply fail to compile if you, say, introduce a destructor - the semantics will not subtly change.
But I can understand the preference for an explicit opt-in, to make clear that it is enforced and not assumed.
I'd argue that it's explicit - that's what a function call does and you don't have implicit function calls in rust.
> Seems the latter is a kind of compiler-level optimization, of which there are already many (I think) that change the semantics internally but guarantee the outward behavior stays the same.
What you're asking for here already exists. Tail calls might be optimized into not allocating extra stack frames, the rust compiler just doesn't guarantee that it will perform that optimization (and almost certainly won't when code is compiled without optimizations... for instance).
What people want is the semantic guarantee that the stack frame won't be allocated. Not just a compiler that often performs the optimization. Otherwise you can't be sure that your code will keep working with new compiler flags/versions/architectures/... You could say "whenever the code is the right shape we'll guarantee the optimization" (C++ famously did this for things like copy elision)... but now the shape of code comes with non-obvious semantic guarantees and that's not rust's style. Hence the proposal for a keyword instead.
For recursion only kotlin.
(For most of these only with syntax specifying it)
Incidentally someone submitted a PR for this issue about 3 hours before the first comment about it in this thread - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/14554 (and 2 hours before this link was submitted to HN)
That's also not all that's happening. It's also making improvements like better internalization support, better error messages, and a small handful of other extensions.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/build-essential/+b...
But it's clear that Ubuntu will remove coreutils, genuine sudo and other tools from the future versions. It's the direction, it's ideological and thus nor merit nor our feedback will change anything here.
That made me curious, it sounds related to this:
Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords - 5 months ago (413 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47464134
i was referring to their counterfeit sudo emulator written in rust. It's called "sudo-rs" afair.
Security issues discovered in sudo-rs - https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2025/msg00...
Sudo-Rs Affected by Multiple Security Vulnerabilities - https://www.phoronix.com/news/sudo-rs-security-ubuntu-25.10
Sudo-rs enables password feedback by default - https://www.phoronix.com/news/sudo-rs-password-feedback
It is frustrating that Canonical has no interest in fixing it, though. It makes it hard to take their claims seriously that you can still use GNU coreutils if you want.
[1] https://jackson.dev/post/rust-coreutils-dd/
You weren't kidding: it was exactly 4 years ago ("September 13, 2022").
There have been a dozen CVEs reported against all of coreutils in the past twenty years. The most recent audit of uutils-coreutils turned up forty-four CVEs.
By all appearances they’re replacing battle-tested and fundamental tooling which hasn’t been a problem with extremely amateurish Rust. The threading highlighted in the linked post above seems pretty egregious.
We might see a fracture open slowly. For me, even AGPL is not enough
You can split hairs however you want, but this created a legacy, and is why Ubuntu is still one of the top recommended distributions for beginners.
And they are slightly behind RHEL: https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-server-market-shar...
FWIW, Canonical did not reach out to any of us who maintain GNU coreutils before, after, or during the transition. Had we known, we could have easily warned them about the incompatibilities.
They have forced systemd despite feedback and genuine concerns.
They have forced fake sudo and uutils the same way.
So, ideology over merit. That doesn't mean that all of the Ubuntu devs are this way, but this means that the company is consistent in its ways to hurt Linux.
Did you mean nothing "but" good?
The other comments are about as good as the one you replied to.
[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/the-future-of-ai-in-ubuntu/81...
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1041694/
If it goes really sideways, and it may, you can either fork Linux or move away to something like one of the BSDs.
Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
That would be an awfully awkward move in the realm of Linux-related politics but if having an MIT-licensed coreutils was such an existential thread, at least you can fix it with aggressive license moves and not code.
I am not totally sure I see the actual concern here, that a company is going to sell devices with a really great `find` implementation but not contribute it upstream?
What it meant was a headache for writing platform-agnostic software. It was not a productive way to create software.
Replacing GPL software with MIT software just encourages this behaviour to come back. We already see it with how macOS userland took FreeBSD and sprinkled incompatibilities everywhere.
2) Seeing how bad the Linux kernel is with all the AI CVEs. It will get worse.
BSD is the future.
Ss for AI slop. There is lots, but I do not think Linus will tolerate a heavy quality degradation and policies will be set up to strike a good balance.
Also Wayland is it being forced on us? I have plenty of coworkers that run X daily because they are still afraid of the Wayland boogeyman despite the fact that their supposed clipboard and screen sharing problems in Wayland (the only two supposed problems they can name) have been solved for years.
There were forty-four against this project in just the last audit.
I am all for RIIR in cases where it makes sense. This does not even remotely appear to be one of them. By all appearances the quality of the code is extremely amateurish at best. coreutils has not been a significant source of vulnerabilities in the past, and they’re replacing it with code written by amateurs that performs worse and already has a worse security track record.
Was there an audit against coreutils? If not, it's not really apple-to-apple comparison.
We are talking about fourfold more CVEs over a twentyfold reduction in time.
Absent more information the default should be to hand wave it away as probably such a difference. CVE counts are not a even slightly reliable metric.
Other ones I find concerning are that you could also bypass '-- no-preserve-root' with a symbolic link to root [2]. Or by using paths equivalent to "/", e.g., "/../" [3]. Historically, GNU coreutils has been pretty good with symbolic links and avoiding TOCTOU races. The only notable one I can remember is a chmod(1) bug [4].
I agree with your general point that the number of CVEs is a useless metric, though.
[1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35352 [2] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35349 [3] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-35338 [4] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/425b8a2f534fe0...