While the days around 2003 when the project had +2500 commits per year are long gone, coreutils is still fairly active, with ~200 commits per year.
Even looking at really simple tools like 'yes', git blame shows a bunch of fairly recent changes.
On commands with specific repository like grep (https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/log/), the project actually peaked not too long ago, in 2010, with 355 commits a year. And the current activity levels (82 commits 2023) are not that far off this high.
Of course, commits are not everything. I expect the actual code changes to be smaller (lots of 1-5 lines fixes vs ~100 lines new functionality). But these tools are still evolving quite significantly.
While the days around 2003 when the project had +2500 commits per year are long gone, coreutils is still fairly active, with ~200 commits per year.
Even looking at really simple tools like 'yes', git blame shows a bunch of fairly recent changes.
On commands with specific repository like grep (https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/log/), the project actually peaked not too long ago, in 2010, with 355 commits a year. And the current activity levels (82 commits 2023) are not that far off this high.
Of course, commits are not everything. I expect the actual code changes to be smaller (lots of 1-5 lines fixes vs ~100 lines new functionality). But these tools are still evolving quite significantly.