[polycaster]

> The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities that are part of Coreutils

…

> Last week, the issue of the package uutils coreutils 0.0.30 successfully passed 507 tests (in the last issue of 506, in a year old – 476) from the standard GNU Coreutils test set.

If I’m reading this right then there are on average only one to five tests per utility (like cat, dd, …) which is a shockingly low number. Particularly when you consider how many options a single command alone might accept. And of course, this alone would not even remotely cover a critical part of all the circumstances that might vary.

[miohtama]

Many of those were written in 80s, testing was not a thing.

[polycaster]

Yes, I remember. It still shows me how I overestimated the maintenance work distributors do / can do. My unreflected expectation was that in the past 40 years test were developed to secure the very foundation we keep on building on since then.