I'm familiar with that.

Joey's apparent resistance to simply splitting out 'parallel' to its own package is ... disappointing. His final comment (regarding other utilities in upstream and switches) is non sequiturs and red herrings.

Welcome to Debian politics.

Where boneheads like Joey get to block trivial fixes for decades (5 years and counting in this case). The project really needs a better process to terminate 'lame' maintainers.

Just for completeness https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=518696 Had parallel been packaged at that time (Mar 2009), it would have pre-empted the parallel in moreutils (which was added June 2009).

My point is that Joey is not in general a bonehead. That's part of what makes this all the more disappointing.

He's no longer the package maintainer, which should make the split more viable.

The last update on that old bug was in 2012.

This is the relevant current bug on the matter against moreutils: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=718816