Canonical's usage of uutils is likely for marketing. But the codebase itself was developed for fun, as an excuse for people to have a hands-on way to learn Rust back before Rust was even released, with a minor justification as being cross-platform. From the original README in 2013:
replyWhy?
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Many GNU, linux and other utils are pretty awesome, and obviously some effort has been spent in the past to port them to windows. However those projects are either old, abandonned, hosted on CVS, written in platform-specific C, etc.
Rust provides a good platform-agnostic way of writing systems utils that are easy to compile anywhere, and this is as good a way as any to try and learn it.
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/9653ed81a2fbf393f42...
>Canonical's usage of uutils is likely for marketing
replyCurrently their usage is actively worsening the security of their distro
These things were caught and basically all of them weren't covered by any test suite (not even GNU coreutils'). It's a bit bold to claim that it's actively worsening it when it's not an LTS.
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