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Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds with Incompatibility

The Rust version of the coreutils 'cp' command caused Ubuntu image builds to fail due to incompatibility issues. The breakage stemmed from differences in behavior between the Rust and GNU implementations of 'cp', leading to build errors in Ubuntu's image generation process.

Background

- Rust Coreutils is a project re-implementing standard Unix command-line tools (like cp, ls, mv) in the Rust programming language, aiming for safer and faster alternatives to the GNU Coreutils commonly used on Linux systems. - Ubuntu is a major Linux distribution that was testing the Rust-based version of the "cp" (copy) command to evaluate it as a potential replacement for the standard GNU cp. - The Rust cp introduced a subtle incompatibility: it failed to preserve certain low-level file attributes (like extended attributes or specific metadata flags) that GNU cp normally copies over. This caused Ubuntu's automated image-building pipeline to produce broken or incomplete system images. - The incident highlights the difficulty of replacing decades-old, battle-tested C utilities with Rust rewrites — even when the new version handles common cases correctly, edge cases and undocumented behavior in the original can lead to breakage in complex build systems.

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