https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/carefully-but-purposefully-ox... seems to have more discussions asking why they're not using existing infrastructure to manage the transition.
I mean, is 'cp' really unsafe in C and will be magically safe in Rust?
Or is this partly to appeal to the comfort of having one uniform language?
Admittedly in the long term regardless these rewrites may well pay off quite well.
"Is it really safer?
While Rust is better than C/C++ for security, these programs are often already very safe. Security is not the key argument for us in this rewrite even if Rust provides some automatic improvements."
I think that answers my question. Thanks!
That said, I actually think that it's pretty likely that switching to using the Rust tools is going to turn up quite a few new non-memory-safety-related (ie: logic) bugs.