I think they are not referring to ls, but to exa [0], which is not maintained anymore.

[0]https://github.com/ogham/exa

Yes, it is marketed as a better “ls”. I was commenting regarding “maintained” in:

> A modern, maintained replacement for ls.

“Maintained” is referring to exa I think.

Yes, exactly this. The original `exa`'s description is

> exa is a modern replacement for `ls`

and it seems `eza` very recently changed the README to match that, given the confusion.

At the time, emphasizing it was actively maintained (in comparison to `exa`) made sense, but by now, `eza` has about 5x more daily downloads than `exa`:

- https://crates.io/crates/eza

- https://crates.io/crates/exa

Right; since the sentence mentions ls, of course, it must be referring to something other than ls.

Like when your wife finds a sexier, more romantic replacement for you, of course she's not comparing anyone to you. (Nobody is sexier or more romantic than you.) She means sexier and more romantic replacement compared to the previous lover she's just broken up with.

We do not

> A modern, maintained replacement for ls.

The tag line certainly reads that way

(first line in the readme)

For some reason it became the norm to think that if some piece of software isn't updated regularly that it's inherently out of date.

For statically built executables, this might just be true.

Since when you give up shared libraries, you give up on security upgrades without needing to rebuild the world.

Or dynamically-linked binaries that are distributed via containers.

Professional Linux masters just use the `echo *` shell built-in

Of course `ls` is maintained, as a part of your shell or of coreutils.

But `eza` is a variation of `exa`, and the latter is no longer maintained, AFAICT.

Because he's deliberately confusing "maintained" with "actively developed" in order to insinuate that the existing tools is unmaintained.

The "maintained" refers to `exa`, which is also written in Rust.

Rust binaries are static, which means they need to be rebuilt when security fixes are published on one of their dependencies.

Without active development to at least update, the static binary becomes a liability.

On another note, the developers on exa did explicitly say the project was unmaintained:

https://github.com/ogham/exa/commit/fb05c421ae98e076989eb6e8...