OpenBSD rejects uutils port as Theo de Raadt smells an 'agenda'

Developer David Uhden Collado proposed adding a new package, sysutils/uutils, to OpenBSD's ports tree — the uutils project, a set of Rust reimplementations of GNU coreutils. His stated goal was to make them usable as drop-in alternatives to the existing GNU ports without changing the source of any dependent port.

To pull that off, the package installs the same g-prefixed commands — gcat, gls, gcp, gdate, gsort, gstat, gtail, gtimeout and the rest — as symlinks to a single multicall binary under libexec/uutils. Each package conflicts with its GNU counterpart and declares the GNU port as a secondary @pkgpath.

'Not a usable approach'

Stuart Henderson answered bluntly that this approach simply isn't usable for ports. As he explained, GNU coreutils exists in the tree mainly to stabilize build environments that are sensitive to GNU behaviour — not as an everyday toolset.

Collado pushed back, saying he finds the Rust reimplementations genuinely interesting: Ubuntu 26.10 has already switched to uutils coreutils, the project has matured, and its permissive MIT license fits OpenBSD's ethos.

'Smells like agenda'

Theo de Raadt was sharper. He dismissed the reasoning — 'we already have permissively licensed utilities, so our users must want a second, subtly different set' — as making no sense. Nobody, he argued, wants binaries with slightly different behaviour in their workflow: if a pipeline is built on openbsd ls, sed and cut and happens to rely on some non-standardized quirk of the output, swapping in a different ls only invites nasty surprises.

When the author admitted he wasn't yet sure whether individual utilities could be installed separately — since uutils is structured as a metapackage and, well, written in Rust — de Raadt couldn't resist: 'Oh, because it is written in Rust. Your agenda is showing.'

The mailing-list thread drew a long chain of replies, but the maintainers' stance held: OpenBSD's ports tree keeps the GPL coreutils and turns the Rust rewrite away.

Source: Lobsters