> Pretty shocking to see the lack of basic thought going into writing what is meant to be critical infrastructure

uutils did not start off as "let's make critical infrastructure in Rust", it started off as "coreutils are small and have tests, so we're rewriting them in Rust for fun". As a result there's needed to be a bunch of cleanup work.

So yeah, their implementation of chmod checked if a path was pointing to the root of the filesystem with 'if file == Path::new("/")'.

How the f** did this sub-amateur slop end up in a big-name linux distribution? We've de-professionalized software engineering to such a degree that people don't even know what baseline competent software looks like anymore

I love Rust, but I wonder if this is an example of the idea that its excellent type system can lull some people into a false sense of security. Particularly when interfacing to low-level code like kernel APIs, which are basically minefields inadvertently designed to trick the unwary, the Rust guarantees are undermined. The extent of this may not be immediately obvious to everyone.