On a more positive note, the thing that causes me some temporary pain might still be awesome for the long-term success of GNU/Linux (or whatever we shall call it now, still looking for an updated pasta[1] recipe). As much as it was a little too early a little too move fast break stuff, I applaud Ubuntu for demanding the drop-in-replacement to be possible.
To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.
To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.
[1]: https://safereddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/av4rl9/what_your... [2]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking [3]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html