The Ubuntu developers have reinstated the cp utility from the GNU Coreutils set after discovering incompatibilities in the implementation of cp from the Rust Coreutils, which caused the Live image build script (livecd-rootfs) to terminate with an error.
In the Ubuntu 24.04 release, due to identified vulnerabilities, the cp, mv, and rm utilities from GNU Coreutils were reinstated, but in the coreutils-from-uutils package update 0.0.0~ubuntu26, the Rust Coreutils utilities were reintroduced. The issue arose from a call in the build script for the cp utility with the options "-afL", which were correctly processed in GNU Coreutils but led to the error "cp: -r not specified; omitting directory " in Rust Coreutils.
The error was due to different behavior when processing conflicting options "-L" and "-a". The "-L" option instructs to dereference symbolic links, while the combined "-a" option, which can be replaced with "-dR --preserve=all", contains the "-d" option that prohibits dereferencing symbolic links. In Rust Coreutils, the combined "-a" option was entirely dropped instead of just removing the conflicting flag "-d", which resulted in the removal of the flag "-R" required for recursive directory copying, as well as the flag "--preserve=all", used to retain previous attributes in the copy.
Source: opennet.ru
