The replacement of the GNU Coreutils toolkit with Rust Coreutils (uutils) in Ubuntu 25.10 has caused the script for automatically checking for package updates to malfunction. Among other issues, the mechanism for automatically installing updates to address vulnerabilities, used in some installations of Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server, as well as in configurations for cloud systems and containers, has stopped functioning. The failure did not affect manual update installations using commands like apt.
The problem arose due to the provided 'date' utility from the uutils set, in which the '-r' ('--reference=file') option, outputting the modification time of a specified file, was not implemented. Specifying this option in the 'date' utility was recognized by the parser, but the logic for processing the option was absent in the code, thus 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 invoked script 'apt.systemd.daily' to determine the modification time of the file '/var/lib/apt/periodic/upgrade-stamp', which was used to compute the last update installation time. Since the 'date' command call with the '-r' option did not produce an error output and returned the current time, the script always believed that the freshest updates were installed in the system.
Notably, in the uutils git repository, a change with full support for the '-r' option was added a month before the release of Ubuntu 25.10, but it was not included in the package rust-coreutils 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 that went into Ubuntu 25.10. The absence of an error output when calling the non-functional option prevented the issue from being identified during automated testing. The issue has been resolved in the rust-coreutils package update 0.2.2-0ubuntu2.1, which can be installed using the command 'sudo apt install --update rust-coreutils'.
Source: opennet.ru
