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Comment by someothherguyy | Hacker News Reader

probably because many of those tools were around for 20ish years before 2005

Could be. The thing is, it kinda doesn't matter; what matters is, what will result in the least bugs/vulnerabilities now? To which I argue the answer is, keeping GNU coreutils. I don't care that they have a head start, I care that they're ahead.

>>> I don't care that they have a head start, I care that they're ahead.

Nice

That's short sighted. The least number of bugs now isn't the only thing that matters. What about in 5 years from now? 10 years? That matters too.

To me it seems inarguable that eventually uutils will have fewer bugs than coreutils, and also making uutils the default will clearly accelerate that. So I don't think it's so easy to dismiss.

I think they were probably still a little premature, but not by much. I'd probably have waited one more release.

fileutils-1.0 was released in 1990 [1]. shellutils-1.0 was released in 1991 [2], and textutils-1.0 was released a month later in the same year [3].

Those three packages were combined into coreutils-5.0 in 2003 [4].

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/CviP42X_hCY/m/Ys... [2] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/xpTRtuFpNQc/m/mR... [3] https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.utils.bug/c/iN5KuoJYRhU/m/V_... [4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2003-04/msg00000...

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