ash history using stderr instead of stdout

Package Information

• Package name: busybox
• Package version: busybox-1.37.0-r8
• Alpine version: 3.21.0
• Alpine architecture: x86_64

Summary

In Alpine 3.20, ash history built-in seems to use stdout:

alpine:~# cat /etc/alpine-release
3.20.2
alpine:~# history 2>/dev/null | wc -l
26
alpine:~# history 2>&1 >/dev/null | wc -l
0

And in 3.21, it now seems to use stderr:

charm:~# cat /etc/alpine-release
3.21.0
charm:~# history 2>/dev/null | wc -l
0
charm:~# history 2>&1 >/dev/null | wc -l
2155

It's unclear to me whether this behaviour change is intentional; and I don't know if anyone is depending on the old behaviour. But it seems a bit inconvenient to have to redirect stderr to stdout just to have to grep through history, eg:

history 2>&1 | grep foo

I combed through the history for this package and found

43a8331c

which is the only thing I can see recently that mentions stderr specifically. It may be related, but I didn't dig too deeply to confirm.