Arthur Besse

But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).

The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(

No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release

This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.

Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?

Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)

What an absolute shitshow

I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.