OpenBSD Developers Reject Uutils Coreutils
OpenBSD developers have rejected a proposal to include the Rust-based 'uutils' coreutils in their base system. The project leadership cited concerns over unnecessary code duplication and potential behavioral inconsistencies with their existing BSD-licensed utilities.
Why it matters
This highlights the ongoing debate within the open-source community regarding the adoption of Rust and the prioritization of system stability and consistency over modern language trends.
A proposed port of the Rust-based uutils coreutils reimplementation sparked heated debate on the OpenBSD mailing list, with project founder Theo de Raadt and senior developers rejecting it as unnecessary duplication that introduces behavioral incompatibilities with the base system.
A proposal to add the uutils coreutils reimplementation to the OpenBSD ports tree drew sharp criticism from senior developers this week, exposing tensions around Rust adoption, licensing philosophy, and the project's commitment to behavioral consistency across its base system utilities.
David Uhden Collado submitted the sysutils/uutils port on September 20, packaging the Rust-based reimplementations of GNU coreutils as drop-in alternatives. The port installs g-prefixed command names—gcat, gls, gcp, gdate, gsort, gstat, gtail, gtimeout, and others—as symlinks to a multicall binary under libexec/uutils . Each package conflicts with its corresponding GNU implementation and declares the GNU port as a secondary @pkgpath .
The response was immediate and dismissive.
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