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

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...