Linux

Whatever the first implementation does ends up being a suicide pact by default.

I agree. The behavior of rm and cat and cp and mv and dd and many other utilities don't necessarily have the interface I would prefer, but they are too widely used for it to be helpful to radically change them. It's somewhat unfortunate that these names are already reserved, but I don't think it's necessary to change them.

In the same way, I don't have a problem with packages having generic names but not actually being useful: I've read that the requests and urllib3 packages for Python aren't being maintained very well, but I don't mind that as long as I can accomplish things while following best practices.

Because of this, I'm not afraid to use names like "getRequest" or "result", especially if they were generated with an automatic refactoring, and I'm not upset when I see similarly generic names being used with source code I'm changing, since I know that the second name for something that's similar to an existing thing will have to actually be descriptive, but the first name is likely to not be.

I have another example of how I'd apply these thoughts: the process for developing v2+ modules for the Go programming language strikes me as inelegant, so I would probably prefer to just create an entirely new repository rather than try to attempt that.

What operating system should I use with my laptop that isn't an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess? I would say that Windows has plenty of kludges, like having problems with certain file names. Many versions of macOS are UNIX® Certified Products (for example, macOS version 15.0 Sequoia on Intel-based Mac computers and on Apple silicon-based Mac computers), so it's surely not any less kludgy than Linux.

I suppose that it's not bad to change documentation to be more specific, and change a program such that it matches the new documentation and wouldn't cause any harm if it replaced all the existing versions of the program, but makes it possible to use the program to solve more problems. That would be to "add functionality in a backward compatible manner".

You are also free to create new programs that are not an exact replacement for existing programs, but can enable some people to stop using one or more other programs. That would not be what I describe as stagnation.

"The cat utility shall read files in sequence and shall write their contents to the standard output in the same sequence.", so I would be very annoyed if it did something different with a certain file but not others. I wouldn't say that the contents of a file and the contents after the file is expanded are the same. In fact, I expect that some people use cat to process compressed files, and changing how cat acts with compressed files would probably cause them a large amount of annoyance, and would needlessly make a lot of existing documentation incorrect.