It's supposed to pass the coreutils upstream tests. If it does, then that would mean the upstream tests still need work
Neither this issue, which doesn't appear to be a bug at all but merely an unimplemented feature, nor the fact that uutils doesn't (yet) pass the entire testsuite, seem to me to at all be an indictment of the uutils project, merely a sign that it is incomplete. Which is hardly surprising when I get the impression it's primarily been a hobby project for a bunch of different developers. It does make me wonder about the wisdom of Ubuntu moving to it.
So this is a good thing even for coreutils itself, they will slowly find all of these untested bits and specify behaviour more clearly and add tests (hopefully).
Doesn't look like people who do their homework
Ubuntu is likely used by 10s of millions of servers and desktops. I'm not sure why this kind of breakage is considered acceptable. Very confusing.
Users who need stability should use the LTS releases. The interim releases have always been more experimental, and have always been where Canonical introduces the big changes to ensure everything's mature by the time the LTS comes around.
> Every six months between LTS versions, Canonical publishes an interim release of Ubuntu, with 25.10 being the latest example. These are production-quality releases and are supported for 9 months, with sufficient time provided for users to update, but these releases do not receive the long-term commitment of LTS releases.
and this is probably a net positive, there's now an early adopter for the project, the testsuite gets improved, and the next Ubuntu LTS will ship more modern tools
I was expecting that they would be concerned about bugs in the untested parts!
I don't know what the code coverage of coreutils' test suite is, but my guess is that it's not spectacular.
but I don't think that should let the uutils authors off the hook - if `--reference` wasn't implemented, that should have been an error rather than silently doing the wrong thing.
after even more Git spelunking, it looks like that problem goes all the way back to the initial "Partial implemantion of date" [1] commit from 2017 - it included support for `--reference` in the argument parsing, including the correct help text, but didn't do anything with it, not even a "TODO: Handle this option" comment like `--set` has.
0: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/14d24f7a530f58...
1: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/41d1dfaf440eabba3...
That bring GNU date(1) line coverage from 79.8% to 87.1%
More coverage is nice, but the foremost care should be to do the right thing, not have some tests for it. Some cultures do not include testing-first and instead treat tests as a tool for edge cases. Nobody bothered to add a tests, for -r, because the did not thing of that as an edge case, but as a core behaviour.