OpenBSD Developers Reject Uutils Coreutils
5 hours ago
- David Uhden Collado proposed adding the uutils Rust-based coreutils to OpenBSD's ports tree as drop-in alternatives with g-prefixed commands.
- Theo de Raadt and senior developers rejected the proposal, calling it unnecessary duplication with 'subtly different' behavior that breaks system consistency.
- De Raadt criticized the licensing argument (MIT vs BSD) and accused the proposal of having a Rust-based agenda.
- OpenBSD's base system is a cohesive whole; swapping individual utilities risks breaking scripts and pipelines depending on specific behaviors.
- Rust adoption in OpenBSD is opposed due to rapid release cycles, dependency chains, and bootstrapping difficulties on supported architectures.
- The uutils port uses a multicall binary (BusyBox-style), conflicting with OpenBSD's packaging expectations of individual binaries.
- The proposal is unlikely to be accepted without major changes, such as splitting the binary, achieving behavioral parity, and addressing Rust concerns.
- OpenBSD users who need GNU utilities already have the existing sysutils/coreutils port with actual GNU implementations.