I have no opinion whatsoever on the rewrite. It might be the best thing since sliced bread for all I know. I have trouble with integrators recklessly shipping untested dependencies however.

> I have trouble with integrators recklessly shipping untested dependencies however.

Isn't this testing what they're doing now, which is what is exposing the bugs that need to be fixed?

> It might be the best thing since sliced bread

Can someone explain to me this analogy? Because I consider sliced bread as decline. But maybe that is cultural thing.

The sliced bread might not be the best quality, but it is rather consistent and much less crummy when making yourself a toast or just butter+jam. No dangers of a kid cutting itself while making its own sandwich either.

Middle class people who think of cooking for themselves as a hobby maybe lose the ability to understand labor-saving technical advances. People who cook as a duty think of cutting bread as more work, which it quite obviously is.

If cooking is a hobby for you, you're seeking labor. Maybe that makes the obvious unintelligible. If you're poor and have a bunch of hungry kids waiting, you don't want the cutting board covering up half your counter space while you're carefully trying not to screw up eight slices of bread before something on the stove burns.

There you go: https://time.com/3946461/sliced-bread-history/

(yes, I don't really get it either)

It was combined with the toaster and sandwiches made easily, and taken away for a bit in WWII, and then came back. It was one of those advancements that "stuck".

A knife that both slices and toasts the bread at the same time would be even better!

Knew what absolute disaster of a video this was going to be before clicking. Highly recommend watching Colin's videos, this one included, for the sheer level of "this is clearly a bad idea, let's do it" that he gives off and the things learned along the way.

so? someone has to maintain software. The unix world is already in a crisis because they can't find maintainers.

Aside from there being no crises, rewriting a set of utilities with nearly no bug reports for years and for which no new features is needed accomplishes what exactly? Aside from new bugs, that is.

There surely would be a more beneficial undertaking somewhere else. If then you’d argue that they may do as they please with their time, fair, but then let’s not pretend this rewrite has any objective value aside from scratching personal itches and learning how cat and co are implemented.

This effort has produced new bug reports and test cases for upstream, clarifying their desired behavior. That's one positive side effect that helps everyone.

That's a really post-hoc rationalization for breaking Ubuntu.

I'm replying to the general case of why. Obviously breakage is unfortunate. But it's not like there's no benefit.

Unfortunately, this will leave a stink that will take a lot of bathing and deodorant to mask.

Finding critical bugs is always worth it. This didn't "break" Ubuntu, it was just a hiccup.

The critical bugs were introduced by replacing working software. And this is just the beginning of finding all the bugs introduced.

It wasn't "worth it" at all.

I recommend that you look into the bug trackers of the original tools. There were a lot of bug reports that came from reimplementing these tools. It's also not a replacement - at all. You and distro managers can choose not to use them.

In my experience the crisis comes more from an influx of people who wants to change everything without having read or caring for specifications and portability. There is however a lack of people like to clean the dirty stuff behind them.