"Also, some contributions had carried comments and code over from GNU coreutils, against our own rule that uutils is an original implementation. We reviewed the tree and rewrote what we found, in comments and in the few functions that followed the C too closely"
What is this rubbish? We have "media" coverage trying to stir up drama about what happens on mailing lists now?
Go and read the thread yourself [1] and you will see that the reason it was rejected was that no one saw a reason to take on the maintenance burden when you already need to have Gnu Core Utils in ports to be able to build a heap of other ports. Focusing on theo@ calling out the submitter for having their judgement clouded by "Because Rust" misses the point.
Besides, Rust already has a solid presence in ports and I know several experienced OpenBSD developers dabbling in it. But the language will never make it into base in its current form as OpenBSD expects self hosting and I think everything in base is Posix(-like), apart from Perl, but I have not taken the time to go digging through my /usr/src.
Theo de Raadt Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:03:20 -0700
David Uhden Collado <daviduh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stuart Henderson wrote:
> > On 2026/09/20 07:01, David Uhden Collado wrote:
> >> The main goal of the packaging is to make these implementations usable
> >> as alternatives to the existing GNU utility ports without requiring
> >> source changes in dependent ports.
> >>
> >> For example, uutils-coreutils installs the same g-prefixed command names
> >> as sysutils/coreutils, including gcat, gls, gcp, gdate, gsort, gstat,
> >> gtail, gtimeout and the other GNU-compatible utilities. They are
> >> symlinks to the upstream multicall binary, which is installed under
> >> libexec/uutils.
> > ...
> >> Each package conflicts with its corresponding GNU implementation and
> >> declares the GNU port as a secondary @pkgpath.
> > I don't think this is a usable approach for ports.
>
> The truth is, I find these Rust reimplementations quite
> interesting. Ubuntu 26.10 has already adopted uutils coreutils because
> the project has reached a level of maturity and stability where it can
> be used reliably. The other reimplementations are still more of a work
> in progress.
Smells like agenda.
> I also think they fit quite well with OpenBSD as alternatives to GNU
> utilities, particularly because they use a permissive MIT license.
Argument is vaguely like: because we already have permissive licenced
utilities, our user base are really interested in having a second set of
permissive licenced utilities which are very subtly different.
That makes no sense. Noone wants subtly different behaving binaries as
part of their workflow. If someone runs the openbsd ls command as part
of a pipeline that uses openbsd sed, or openbsd cut, or some other
openbsd utility and it parses a non-standized output characteristic
by accident, there are no people in this universe who wants to replace
that ls with a different ls and get surprised by un-standardized tooling
behaviour clash.
> I'm not sure yet whether it's possible to install the individual
> utilities as separate binaries. This is new territory for me, since
> uutils is structured as a metapackage, and because it's written in
> Rust.
Oh, because it is written in Rust.
Your agenda is showing.
I couldn’t agree more with Theo on this one. I suspect a lot of people interested in doing this stuff haven’t had to maintain anything for a long time (10 years+). This to me feels like the painful switch between SunOS and Solaris we had to do back in the day. Lots of very small differences. And you have to maintain them forever if you have dual stacks of tools.
Not only that the rust ecosystem imports a HUGE difficult to control surface area.
Always feels like a vanity project when I see ideological rewrites. Also didn’t they introduce a ton more CVEs doing this on the Ubuntu side.
Bit hostile. I get the point that it's unnecessary, but the whole "agenda" thing feels kneejerk. Just say that being written in Rust isn't a good enough reason for adoption.
Perhaps, uutils is garbage though, pushed by some only for rather bad reasons (Rust and license). I worry more about projects where it is not directly laughed out of the room.
I disagree. It takes a different personality and position to maintain a project like this. If you aren’t the biggest asshole then you’re at the mercy of the biggest asshole, which probably means you’re going to end up making ideological decisions rather than engineering decisions. Especially seeing has how politicised everything is these days.
Thus has exactly the communication style that is required to support the project.
And yes I have been on the end of a Theo quip. It’s a badge of honour because ultimately he was right.
I agree that strong leadership is a requirement. However there’s a huge difference between being strong against pushy arseholes, and preemptively being an arsehole because people make allowances for your behaviour to others.
This just comes down to effective communication skills. And is evident by the number of other large projects survive without the rudeness.
Theo isnt an example that deserves emulation and admiration.
Agreed. It's misattributing quotes and talking about OpenBSD releases from more than a year ago as if they were upcoming releases. Something's seriously wrong with this article.
My account is banned, so for whomever with [showdead] on:
It's unfortunate that the supposed pillar of security dismisses Rust on dubious grounds. Yes, there is agenda coming from Ubuntu. And yet, Rust IS the secure alternative to C/C++ (alternative is a misnomer, it's better than the latter on all fronts), so OpenBSD dismissal is very superficial.
I think the security argument for carrying an alternative set of Posix-like utilities to Gnu Core Utilities is rather weak. These would mostly have been used to build other ports, or are you suggesting that this would harden the ports build systems (which already use privsep at that)? If so, I would take the lower maintenance burden any day and just wait for the Linux ecosystem to make up their mind as to whether Uutils becomes the new standard or not.
Of course, on OpenBSD it is GNU Core Utilities themselves that already are the alternative suite of SUS utilities. So it's an argument for carrying alternatives to the alternatives.
I wonder might this be partly due to licensing concerns given uutils have acknowledged they've copied GNU GPL code. From their latest release notes (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/releases/tag/0.12.0):
"Also, some contributions had carried comments and code over from GNU coreutils, against our own rule that uutils is an original implementation. We reviewed the tree and rewrote what we found, in comments and in the few functions that followed the C too closely"
What is this rubbish? We have "media" coverage trying to stir up drama about what happens on mailing lists now?
Go and read the thread yourself [1] and you will see that the reason it was rejected was that no one saw a reason to take on the maintenance burden when you already need to have Gnu Core Utils in ports to be able to build a heap of other ports. Focusing on theo@ calling out the submitter for having their judgement clouded by "Because Rust" misses the point.
[1]: https://www.mail-archive.com/ports@openbsd.org/msg143875.htm...
Besides, Rust already has a solid presence in ports and I know several experienced OpenBSD developers dabbling in it. But the language will never make it into base in its current form as OpenBSD expects self hosting and I think everything in base is Posix(-like), apart from Perl, but I have not taken the time to go digging through my /usr/src.
Discussion nhere:
https://www.mail-archive.com/ports@openbsd.org/msg143875.htm...
Of note is Theo's answer which follows below:
---
---I couldn’t agree more with Theo on this one. I suspect a lot of people interested in doing this stuff haven’t had to maintain anything for a long time (10 years+). This to me feels like the painful switch between SunOS and Solaris we had to do back in the day. Lots of very small differences. And you have to maintain them forever if you have dual stacks of tools.
Not only that the rust ecosystem imports a HUGE difficult to control surface area.
Always feels like a vanity project when I see ideological rewrites. Also didn’t they introduce a ton more CVEs doing this on the Ubuntu side.
44 CVE's : https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/
Also stuff like: "Set Permissions at Creation Time, Not After"
What a shit show.
Bit hostile. I get the point that it's unnecessary, but the whole "agenda" thing feels kneejerk. Just say that being written in Rust isn't a good enough reason for adoption.
Theo de Raadt is like that, everything he touches is gold, everything someone else comes up with is garbage, unless he forks it.
Perhaps, uutils is garbage though, pushed by some only for rather bad reasons (Rust and license). I worry more about projects where it is not directly laughed out of the room.
Yeah, that’s Theo de Raadt for you.
In fact this feels remarkably tame by his standards.
The guy is undoubtedly an exceptional talent. But his communication skills isn’t one of them.
I disagree. It takes a different personality and position to maintain a project like this. If you aren’t the biggest asshole then you’re at the mercy of the biggest asshole, which probably means you’re going to end up making ideological decisions rather than engineering decisions. Especially seeing has how politicised everything is these days.
Thus has exactly the communication style that is required to support the project.
And yes I have been on the end of a Theo quip. It’s a badge of honour because ultimately he was right.
I agree that strong leadership is a requirement. However there’s a huge difference between being strong against pushy arseholes, and preemptively being an arsehole because people make allowances for your behaviour to others.
This just comes down to effective communication skills. And is evident by the number of other large projects survive without the rudeness.
Theo isnt an example that deserves emulation and admiration.
>But his communication skills isn’t one of them.
It's the projects shield, and pretty good one at that ;)
You don’t need to be rude to be a project shield.
Linux went through this evolution with Linus Torvalds, and plenty of other projects have managed to have strong leadership without the hostility.
>You don’t need to be rude to be a project shield.
But you can, it's also really good to shy away "over-sensible" individuals, if you think that was rude...welcome, you are one of those snowflakes.
>Linux went through this evolution with Linus Torvalds
Not he's still the old one, just without "retro abortion"
the conversation here makes way more sense than the quotes from TFA
whoever wrote/generated the article does not seem to understand email syntax
This reads like garbage and Lunduke already did better coverage
Agreed. It's misattributing quotes and talking about OpenBSD releases from more than a year ago as if they were upcoming releases. Something's seriously wrong with this article.
My account is banned, so for whomever with [showdead] on:
It's unfortunate that the supposed pillar of security dismisses Rust on dubious grounds. Yes, there is agenda coming from Ubuntu. And yet, Rust IS the secure alternative to C/C++ (alternative is a misnomer, it's better than the latter on all fronts), so OpenBSD dismissal is very superficial.
I think the security argument for carrying an alternative set of Posix-like utilities to Gnu Core Utilities is rather weak. These would mostly have been used to build other ports, or are you suggesting that this would harden the ports build systems (which already use privsep at that)? If so, I would take the lower maintenance burden any day and just wait for the Linux ecosystem to make up their mind as to whether Uutils becomes the new standard or not.
Of course, on OpenBSD it is GNU Core Utilities themselves that already are the alternative suite of SUS utilities. So it's an argument for carrying alternatives to the alternatives.
On paper yes but it introduces different problems. The trade off isn’t one that everyone universally believes is worth it.