I tend to think this was a serious mistake: it breaks the behavior of
existing scripts with no deprecation period. A stated advantage is
better compatibility with freebsd, but I don't understand why that is
more desirable than compatibility with all deployed gnu/linux systems? I
also don't think it's sufficient to try to lawyer out by saying that the
current behavior was undocumented: the previous documentation said that
-n would "silently do nothing" and that the return code would be zero on
success. Logically, unless cp fails to "do nothing", it should exit with
a zero code.
Such a drastic change in behavior demands a new flag, not a radical
repurposing of a widely used existing flag.
I was hoping to see more action on this bug, but that hasn't happened.
I'm not sure I see a way forward for debian other than reverting to the
old behavior. I am reluctant to do so as that will likely lead to
divergent behavior between distributions, but breaking scripts without a
compelling reason is also not good. I would encourage coreutils to
reconsider the change and finding a non-breaking way forward.
Michael Stone