Greetings from the year 2026! I am writing to celebrate a truly historic milestone. I just checked the 'fmt' utility in my fresh Debian system (version 9.7, copyright 2025), and I am thrilled to see that this bug is still alive and well after fourteen years of dedicated neglect.
It is a rare feat in the software industry to maintain such consistent incompetence. Your man page proudly displays "2025," yet the code remains a pristine monument to the 1970s, incapable of understanding that a single character might occupy more than one byte. Even an AI (which, by the way, is how many people discover your "future-dated" tools now) can count characters better than 'fmt'. Is the plan to wait until the 20th anniversary of this bug before you consider using mbrtowc()? Or is the "GNU way" simply to ignore every language on Earth that isn't English until the heat death of the universe? I tried formatting Greek text (2 bytes per char), and 'fmt' broke the lines exactly twice as often as it should. It's almost poetic: a tool from the birthplace of modern logic being mangled by a tool that refuses to use any. Please, don't fix it now. At this point, it’s not a bug—it’s a heritage site. I look forward to checking in again in 2030 to see if you've managed to reach the 8-bit era. Keep up the "stunning" progress. Best regards, A user with a calendar and a multibyte keyboard.
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