Solaris 7 lacks this, so one does not have to go back as far as you
believe.
I fully recognize that people are still running Solaris 7 (and probably
older versions) on mission-critical and other systems. But, how many of
those systems are (a) installing brand-new GNU packages (which
presumably wouldn't be happening on mission-critical systems) *and*
(b) have *not* previously installed coreutils/sh-utils?
I suspect the answer is zero. If it's not zero, then it's at least very
rare, and for those times, it's hardly impossible to get printf one way
or another. Using bash is another possibility.
I'm still not seeing the problematic scenario here.
Being able to depend on basic printf functionality would be a great boon ...
