It’s not the viability of the rust replacement of uutils that is the core of my issue. My issue is that mature code that has been tested, audited, and is stable has been removed for no viable reason other than it could have bugs.
It’s not for no viable reason. Rust is just safer than C. There absolutely are bugs with GNU coreutils, so it’s not even a hypothetical like you implied. But beyond safety, some of the Rust equivalents are more performant than their C counterparts.
And uutils is already heavily tested against the GNU coreutils. It’s not some fly-by-night rewrite that people aren’t serious about. I don’t know if it’s been formally audited yet, but it absolutely will be when companies like Canonical (and hopefully SUSE and Red Hat, one day) want to start shipping them.
It’s not the viability of the rust replacement of uutils that is the core of my issue. My issue is that mature code that has been tested, audited, and is stable has been removed for no viable reason other than it could have bugs.
It’s not for no viable reason. Rust is just safer than C. There absolutely are bugs with GNU coreutils, so it’s not even a hypothetical like you implied. But beyond safety, some of the Rust equivalents are more performant than their C counterparts.
And uutils is already heavily tested against the GNU coreutils. It’s not some fly-by-night rewrite that people aren’t serious about. I don’t know if it’s been formally audited yet, but it absolutely will be when companies like Canonical (and hopefully SUSE and Red Hat, one day) want to start shipping them.