9 pointsby ImJamal8 hours ago6 comments
  • evil-olive6 hours ago
    Ubuntu's rollout of a Rust-based coreutils replacement had a bug [0] that, among other things, broke automatic updates.

    and the bug was...not subtle, either. it just silently ignored the documented behavior of `date -r` (printing the modtime of a file) [1, 2]

    as a time synchronization nerd, I've been following ntpd-rs's development, and tested it out as a possible replacement for Chrony. my overall impression is that like rust-coreutils, it's a well-intentioned project but not ready for prime-time, certainly not at the level of "installed by default on Ubuntu" (even in a non-LTS release)

    for example, there's an issue that's been open for ~9 months about logging being unnecessarily verbose, and flooding the system journal [3].

    and an issue titled "implement new algorithm" opened by one of the core contributors, with zero description or details [4].

    these are not the hallmarks of a stable, mature open-source project.

    0: https://lwn.net/Articles/1043103/

    1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45687743

    2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45688185

    3: https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/issues/1912

    4: https://github.com/pendulum-project/ntpd-rs/issues/2124

    • cozzyd5 hours ago
      I count 132 packages in cargo.lock.

      chrony has some dependencies too but for important optional features like seccomp or capability dropping that I don't think ntpd-rs even implements...

  • Bender7 hours ago
    In upcoming releases, Ubuntu will be adopting ntpd-rs as the default time synchronization client and server, eventually replacing chrony, linuxptp and with any luck, gpsd for time syncing use-cases.

    Can they not rewrite all the other daemons in Rust as well? I would rather keep using Chrony on all the Linux distributions that I use.

  • bcjdjsndon4 hours ago
    Just because something's written in rust doesn't make it memory safe. Rust programmers are no smarter than c programmers and cannot be trusted to write unsafe code, and rust doesn't stop you from writing unsafe code. Tell me what part of that is untrue
  • cozzyd6 hours ago
    Not GPL, not interested in replacing chrony
  • smeefers4 hours ago
    [dead]
  • speefers6 hours ago
    [dead]