As I wrote you privately last month, the coreutils maintainers (who are
not me) are pretty busy. The proposed change in bug#47883 would be
incompatible with longstanding tradition and would almost certainly
break some existing scripts running on GNU/Linux. This is not something
to do lightly.
It might be possible to come up with a different change that would
address the issue raised without being so disruptive. Whatever change
(if any) is chosen, someone needs to think it through, code it up,
document it, and test it. Although nobody's found the time to do that,
perhaps you could volunteer or find someone who could volunteer; that
would surely accelerate the process.
You mentioned that we have multiple bug reports (now 47059, 47883,
48002) on basically the same topic, so I have taken the liberty of
merging them.
