Replacement of the GNU Coreutils toolkit with Rust Coreutils (uutils) in the Ubuntu 25.10 distribution kit caused to break the script for automatically checking for package updates. Among other things, it turned out that the mechanism for automatically installing updates to eliminate vulnerabilities, used in some Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server installations, as well as cloud and container configurations. The glitch did not affect manual update installation operations using apt-like commands.
The problem occurred due to shipping the “date” utility from the uutils set, which did not implement the “-r” option (“–reference=file”), which displays the modification time of the specified file. Specifying this option in the “date” utility was accepted by the parser, but the logic for processing the option was absent in the code, so instead of the last modification time of the file, the current time was always returned.
The “date” command with the “-r” option was used in the daily called “apt.systemd.daily” script to determine the file modification time “/var/lib/apt/periodic/upgrade-stamp”, which was used to calculate the last time updates were installed. Since calling “date” with the “-r” option did not produce an error and returned the current time, the script always assumed that the system had the latest updates installed.
It is noteworthy that in the uutils git repository there was a change with correctly working full support for the “-r” option was addeda month before the release of Ubuntu 25.10, but was not included in the package rust-coreutils0.2.2-0ubuntu2, included with Ubuntu 25.10. The absence of an error output when calling a non-working option did not allow us to identify the problem during automated testing. The problem has been resolved by updating the rust-coreutils package 0.2.2-0ubuntu2.1, which can be installed using the command “sudo apt install –update rust-coreutils”.