> I'm actually surprised by the amount of changes in 'cat'.

"'cat -v' considered harmful" is an ongoing meme, but there's truth to it. http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

cat(1) concatenates files. Some software should be considered done.

Starting in ~2008, the ones marked 'maint' and 'all' touch multiple files and don't appear to make substantive changes to e.g. cat. Since that categorization started, only 10 of the changes have been specific to cat.

How about the history for "true": https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits/master/src/tr...

To be fair, there are a lot of commits that just update copyright years or documentation. IMHO that's just regular housekeeping and cannot mean that cat was not "done" in first place.