"Ubuntu's decision to switch to Rust-based coreutils in 25.10 hasn't been the smoothest ride," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, "as the latest — albeit now resolved — bug underscores."
[Coreutils] are used by a number of processes, apps and scripts, including Ubuntu's own unattended-upgrades process, which automatically checks for new software updates. Alas, the Rust-based version of date had a bug which meant Ubuntu 25.10 desktops, servers, cloud and container images were not able to automatically check for updates when configured. Unattended-upgrades hooks into the date utility to check the timestamp of a reference file of when an update check was last run and, past a certain date, checks again. But date was incorrectly showing the current date, always.
A fix has been issued so only Ubuntu 25.10 installs withrust-coreutils 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 (or earlier) are affected.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.