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.
It's a part of Ubuntu 25.10 to get it ready for prime time for Ubuntu 26.04.
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.
Maybe the thought is that there will be more pressure now on getting all the tests to pass given the larger install base? It isn't a great way to push out software, but it's certainly a way to provide motivation. I'm personally more interested in whether the ultimate decision will be to leave these as the default coreutils implementation in the next Ubuntu LTS release version (26.04) or if they will switch back (and for what reason).
they have a tendency to try novel/different things, like upstart (init system), mir (desktop compositor (?))
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
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).
yeah, based on some more digging, it looks like a test case for `date --reference` in GNU coreutils was only added a few hours ago [0] so I assume it was in response to this bug.
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.
> then that would mean the upstream tests still need work
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.
