This status update (subscribe via RSS) comes about 12 months after the last one, and coincides loosely with the upcoming release 8.24.
Note also the bug tracker with stats which records additions, feature requests and issues.

Rejected ideas

Some of the hardest work on coreutils is knowing what to reject and providing appropriate justification to the contributors. The contributions below all came since the last update and while good ideas, they were not included for various reasons detailed on the mailing list. These are included in a full list of rejected coreutils requests.

• ls -z,--zero to NUL terminate entries. Existing tools like find(1) were thought sufficient
• wc -q to suppress the file name. Redirecting file to stdin is sufficient
• cp,mv --bwlimit to throttle data transfer rates. This is available in rsync, and is better suited to higher level tools
• timeout setting a TIMEOUT env var. The use case is unusual and supported with explicitly setting vars with env etc
• uniq --check-fields=N to only check N fields. uniq --key would be a more general solution
• csplit --output=N to output only the Nth file. This was thought too specialized to support
• dd conv=offload to offload copying to various backends. This was thought too specialized to support explicitly
• wc --max-chars=N to filter out long lines. Existing filters like awk 'length($0) <= 3' were deemed more appropriate
• md5sum --no-filename to only output the checksum. Postprocessing the output was deemed sufficient
• rename command (from util-linux). Existing commands can do this, and adjusting for inclusion in coreutils was thought too disruptive
• stat --files0-from=FILE. This is only needed for commands needing to process all arguments in a single invocation
• stat --digest-type=WORD. It was thought better to use the existing checksum utils and join the file names etc. separately
• stat --quoting-style=WORD. Adjustments to --format='%N' were thought more appropriate
• dd conv=truncpost. To support filtering files in place. Due to error handling this was not thought useful enough
• sort --header to exclude leading lines from the sort. sed, head, etc. were deemed sufficient
• testline program to expose bloom filter functionality. It was thought options to existing tools were more appropriate
• du --sort to sort by disk usage. This is already supported directly by du -h | sort -h
• yes -n to not output a '\n'. yes whatever | tr -d '\n' was thought sufficient
• ls --sort=inode. It was thought find ... | sort was more appropriate for this low level functionality
• touch --verbose. It was thought that xargs --verbose or (set -x; touch *) was sufficient

Additions

Note you can see the latest changes as they're added in the NEWS file (subscribe via RSS).

• chroot --userspec is more efficent and generic doing lookups both inside and outside the chroot
• All tools can be built as a single multi-call binary
• mv uses a reflink by default to more efficiently rename across BTRFS subvolumes
• dd status=progress to update a status line once per second
• od --endian to select byte order for the input data
• One can now disable ls coloring with env variables indicating terminal capabilities
• cp and mv now preserve xattrs when copying symlinks
• cp --sparse tries harder to create holes

TODO

These new items were identified since the last update.

• Implement more general detection and display of extended attributes for ls and stat
• Support fractional SI suffixes for sort -h and numfmt
• Have tac honor the input file offset to support skipping some input
• Possibly support specified date input formats to guide parsing of dates
• Support alphabetic output from seq
• Support multiple fields in numfmt
• Possibly support 'M' (intmax) and 'LL' (long long) size modifiers with od
• Possibly support more integration of uniq and sort
• Make head reponsive to `stdbuf -iO`
• Possibly add unicode point identification in od output
• Possibly have a configurable header/content lines per page in pr
• Possibly support relative symlinks with cp -s, using logic from ln --relative
• Support cell/character/bytes in printf width specifiers
• Indicate capabilities in "extra perms" chan in ls
• Support context sensitive relative dates to avoid gotchas with determining previous month etc.
• Support a stat format char to output symlink names
• Implement `tail -r` as equivalent to `tac` to sync up with POSIX proposal

These items mentioned in the last update are not done yet.

• Integrate fallocate(2) into cp and mv. The interface hasn't been improved, so we'll just use it as is
• posix_fallocate() is still not used due to its dependence on fallocate(2)
• libunistring is now available in debian and fedora and we're about to start using it in coreutils
• sort --head or sort --range to more efficiently output a subset of the input
• add a NSA/DoD verify function to shred
• Handle ACLs by not using umask
• Automatically use more CPU cache efficient buffer sizes in sort
• Possibly integrate the threaded external sort patch
• Add an inplace contrib/ script (or command) to robustly edit files in-place
• Possibly add OCFS2 support to cp --reflink
• cut --blank-separated
• support SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE in ZFS and elsewhere to efficiently process binary sparse files
• wc -b -M to output frequencies of characters
• multiarch support in stdbuf
• rename might be a candidate for coreutils
• --noatime support to various recursive traversal tools
• rm --no-traverse-mount-points which would be especially useful with bind mounts
• stat(1) and ls(1) support for birth time. Dependent on xstat() being provided by the kernel
• fmt -w should not have such low limits
• cp -u should be restartable. Currently may leave partial files in dest, or wrong files in the presence of hard links
• split --confirm-create. To allow one to insert a new disk or whatever. There might be a way to do this externally?
• chmod -hHLP should be supported (like BSD)
• support tee --write-error={[cont],ignore,exit}
• support sleep,timeout --date="..." to specify absolute times independent of suspend/resume etc.
• expand seq fast path to more cases like specifying hex, adding arbitrary integers and subtraction etc.
• Possibly use sendfile in cp. Not under consideration yet until benchmarked and the code made portable enough
• Add an sha-3 util. Work already started on such a GPL util elsewhere
• Possibly s/--first-only/--initial/ in unexpand, to be less ambiguous and match expand
• mkdir -p should be concurrent. I.E. dirs created separately while its running shouldn't cause an error
• Possibly adjust sort merging to minimize data I/O. Also unexpectedly slow merging was reported
• Sort threading issues were reported on Solaris 10 and RHEL 5.8
• Integrate multi-byte support for expand and unexpand using libunistring and a common core for the two utils
• Possibly support tail -f --timestamp to prepend timestamps to output
• Integrate support for ISO 8601 basic format as input to date
• Possibly indicate "capabilities" with the ^ character instead of colors
• Integrate {join,uniq} --key to provide sort(1) like field processing in join(1) and uniq(1)
• Integrate tests adjustment to use rngtest
• sort might use vfork() or posix_spawn() for more efficient memory handling
• csplit -i to support specifying the start number when naming split files
• Possibly add shuf --all-permutations to consume all input and output all permutations
• cut, numfmt, sort and join should be consistent and all allow overriding the input separator option
• install --preserve to give more control over copied attributes and better symmetry with cp
• Improve performance of shred --repeat by using reservoir-sampling with replacement
• Possibly allow stty to set arbitrary speeds
• Possibly implement deterministic handling of hardlinks by cp -R
• Use copyfile() when available to support efficient remote copies and file system specific attributes
• Perhaps allow specifying a --random-seed option to sort, shuf, shred to seed the PRNG