This project contains a GNU coreutils-like collection of utilities from the FreeBSD source code tree.
The project began in October 2017 and initially ported code from the OpenBSD source tree. The original objective was to see how much work was involved and to compare relative sizes of built executables with those found in GNU coreutils and other projects. In an effort to gain more featureful BSD commands and to possibly work more easily with dotfiles for users on MacOS X systems, the project started over by porting the commands from FreeBSD in April 2021.
When a new release of FreeBSD is made, the import-src.sh script should be used to update the source tree. First edit upstream.conf and then run the import-src.sh script. The script will fetch the new release source and copy in the source for the commands we have. Any patches in patches/ will be applied. These may need updating between releases, so keep that in mind. The workflow is basically:
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Change VER in upstream.conf
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Verify URL in upstream.conf works (FreeBSD may move things around).
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Run ./import-src.sh. It is adviseable to capture stdout and stderr to see what patches fail to apply. Any that fail, you want to manually fix and then run import-src.sh again to get a clean import of the version you are updating to.
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Now build all the commands and fix any new build errors.
Once this is clean, you can commit the import of the new version of FreeBSD code. The import-src.sh and patches step is meant to make it more clear what changes I apply to FreeBSD code from release to release and also if any external projects want to use these patches and the FreeBSD source directly.
You will need GNU-compatible C and C++ compilers, typically gcc/g++ or clang/clang++. You will also need flex (or some other lex as long as it is compatible with flex), byacc or bison, meson and ninja/samurai. If you wish to use the top-level Makefile (which is just a simple wrapper around meson), you will need GNU make. Most distributions have all these tools already available in their repositories.
gcc/g++ https://gcc.gnu.org/
clang/clang++ https://llvm.org/
GNU make https://www.gnu.org/software/make/
meson https://mesonbuild.com/
ninja https://ninja-build.org/
flex https://github.com/westes/flex
byacc https://invisible-island.net/byacc/byacc.html
Additionally you will need the following shared libraries to build all of the programs in this project:
terminfo https://invisible-mirror.net/archives/ncurses/
libedit http://thrysoee.dk/editline/
openssl https://www.openssl.org/
libxo https://github.com/Juniper/libxo
The terminfo library may be either standalone (libtinfo) or a part of the curses library, dependending on build. The ls(1) command needs this. bc(1) needs libedit, which is the BSD alternative to GNU readline. dc(1) uses libcrypto which comes from OpenSSL. seq(1) needs libm, but that comes from your C library. df(1) and wc(1) use libxo for outputting to multiple formats.
Users of musl-based Linux systems also need libfts and librpmatch installed.
Probably. The FreeBSD code is pretty solid. But remember this project is a port of that code to Linux systems. Pull requests welcome for any bugs found. Also you can just open an issue on the project page and we will try to get to it.