OpenBSD Developers Reject Rust-based Uutils Coreutils Port

Proposal for Uutils Coreutils Port

David Uhden Collado submitted a port for sysutils/uutils on September 20. This port aimed to package Rust-based reimplementations of GNU coreutils as alternative tools for OpenBSD. The proposed installation would use g-prefixed command names, such as gcat and gls, linking them to a multicall binary.

Developer Opposition and Concerns

The proposal met immediate and strong opposition from OpenBSD's senior developers. Stuart Henderson expressed skepticism about the usability of the approach, while project founder Theo de Raadt directly criticized it, stating it "smells like agenda." De Raadt also dismissed the licensing argument, noting that OpenBSD already uses permissively licensed utilities.

A primary concern highlighted by de Raadt is the introduction of tools with "subtly different" behavior. OpenBSD's base system relies on consistent behavior among its utilities, and adding a second set of tools could create problems for users who pipe output between different commands.

Compatibility and Consistency Issues

De Raadt emphasized that "Noone wants subtly different behaving binaries as part of their workflow." He explained that if an OpenBSD ls command is used in a pipeline with other OpenBSD utilities like sed or cut, parsing non-standardized output characteristics from a new tool would cause issues. This highlights the project's commitment to maintaining behavioral consistency across its core system utilities.