> Rust is trying to systemically improve safety and reliability of programs, so the degree to which it succeeds is Rust's problem.

GNU coreutils first shipped in what, the 1980s? It's so old that it would be very hard to find the first commit. Whereas uutils is still beta software which didn't ask to be representative of "Rust", at all. Moreover, GNU coreutils are still sometimes not compatible with their UNIX forebears. Even considering this first, more modest standard, it is ridiculous to hold this software to it, in particular.

You would not be able to find the first commit. The repositories for Fileutils, Shellutils, and Texutils do not exist, at least anywhere that I can find. They were merged as Coreutils in 2003 in a CVS repository. A few years later, it was migrated to git.

If anyone has original Fileutils, Shellutils, or Textutils archives (released before the ones currently on GNU's ftp server), I would be interested in looking at them. I looked into this recently for a commit [1].

[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/coreutils@gnu.org/msg12529.html