coreutils/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to coreutils

Contributions are very welcome via Pull Requests. If you don't know where to start, take a look at the good-first-issues. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the issues or on Discord.

Best practices

1. Follow what GNU is doing in terms of options and behavior. It is recommended to look at the GNU Coreutils manual (on the web, or locally using info <utility>). It is more in depth than the man pages and provides a good description of available features and their implementation details.
2. If possible, look at the GNU test suite execution in the CI and make the test work if failing.
3. Use clap for argument management.
4. Make sure that the code coverage is covering all of the cases, including errors.
5. The code must be clippy-warning-free and rustfmt-compliant.
6. Don't hesitate to move common functions into uucore if they can be reused by other binaries.
7. Unsafe code should be documented with Safety comments.
8. uutils is original code. It cannot contain code from existing GNU or Unix-like utilities, nor should it link to or reference GNU libraries.

Platforms

We take pride in supporting many operating systems and architectures. Any code you contribute must at least compile without warnings for all platforms in the CI. However, you can use #[cfg(...)] attributes to create platform dependent features.

Tip: For Windows, Microsoft provides some images (VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and Parallels) for development: https://developer.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/

Tools

We have an extensive CI that will check your code before it can be merged. This section explains how to run those checks locally to avoid waiting for the CI.

pre-commit hooks

A configuration for pre-commit is provided in the repository. It allows automatically checking every git commit you make to ensure it compiles, and passes clippy and rustfmt without warnings.

To use the provided hook:

1. Install pre-commit
2. Run pre-commit install while in the repository directory

Your git commits will then automatically be checked. If a check fails, an error message will explain why, and your commit will be canceled. You can then make the suggested changes, and run git commit ... again.

clippy

cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features

The msrv key in the clippy configuration file clippy.toml is used to disable lints pertaining to newer features by specifying the minimum supported Rust version (MSRV).

rustfmt

cargo fmt --all

cargo-deny

This project uses cargo-deny to detect duplicate dependencies, checks licenses, etc. To run it locally, first install it and then run with:

cargo deny --all-features check all

Markdown linter

We use markdownlint to lint the Markdown files in the repository.

Spell checker

We use cspell as spell checker for all files in the project. If you are using VS Code, you can install the code spell checker extension to enable spell checking within your editor. Otherwise, you can install cspell separately.

If you want to make the spell checker ignore a word, you can add

// spell-checker:ignore word_to_ignore

at the top of the file.

Testing

Testing can be done using either Cargo or make.

Testing with Cargo

Just like with building, we follow the standard procedure for testing using Cargo:

cargo test

By default, cargo test only runs the common programs. To run also platform specific tests, run:

cargo test --features unix

If you would prefer to test a select few utilities:

cargo test --features "chmod mv tail" --no-default-features

If you also want to test the core utilities:

cargo test  -p uucore -p coreutils

Running the complete test suite might take a while. We use nextest in the CI and you might want to try it out locally. It can speed up the execution time of the whole test run significantly if the cpu has multiple cores.

cargo nextest run --features unix --no-fail-fast

To debug:

gdb --args target/debug/coreutils ls
(gdb) b ls.rs:79
(gdb) run

Testing with GNU Make

To simply test all available utilities:

make test

To test all but a few of the available utilities:

make SKIP_UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' test

To test only a few of the available utilities:

make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' test

To include tests for unimplemented behavior:

make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' SPEC=y test

To run tests with nextest just use the nextest target. Note you'll need to install nextest first. The nextest target accepts the same arguments like the default test target, so it's possible to pass arguments to nextest run via CARGOFLAGS:

make CARGOFLAGS='--no-fail-fast' UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' nextest

Run Busybox Tests

This testing functionality is only available on *nix operating systems and requires make.

To run busybox tests for all utilities for which busybox has tests

make busytest

To run busybox tests for a few of the available utilities

make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' busytest

To pass an argument like "-v" to the busybox test runtime

make UTILS='UTILITY_1 UTILITY_2' RUNTEST_ARGS='-v' busytest

Comparing with GNU

To run uutils against the GNU test suite locally, run the following commands:

bash util/build-gnu.sh
# Build uutils without release optimizations
UU_MAKE_PROFILE=debug bash util/build-gnu.sh
bash util/run-gnu-test.sh
# To run a single test:
bash util/run-gnu-test.sh tests/touch/not-owner.sh # for example
# To run several tests:
bash util/run-gnu-test.sh tests/touch/not-owner.sh tests/rm/no-give-up.sh # for example
# If this is a perl (.pl) test, to run in debug:
DEBUG=1 bash util/run-gnu-test.sh tests/misc/sm3sum.pl

Note that it relies on individual utilities (not the multicall binary).

Improving the GNU compatibility

The Python script ./util/remaining-gnu-error.py shows the list of failing tests in the CI.

To improve the GNU compatibility, the following process is recommended:

1. Identify a test (the smaller, the better) on a program that you understand or is easy to understand. You can use the ./util/remaining-gnu-error.py script to help with this decision.
2. Build both the GNU and Rust coreutils using: bash util/build-gnu.sh
3. Run the test with bash util/run-gnu-test.sh <your test>
4. Start to modify <your test> to understand what is wrong. Examples:
   1. Add set -v to have the bash verbose mode
   2. Add echo $? where needed
   3. When the variable fail is used in the test, echo $fail to see when the test started to fail
   4. Bump the content of the output (ex: cat err)
   5. ...
5. Or, if the test is simple, extract the relevant information to create a new test case running both GNU & Rust implementation
6. Start to modify the Rust implementation to match the expected behavior
7. Add a test to make sure that we don't regress (our test suite is super quick)

Commit messages

To help the project maintainers review pull requests from contributors across numerous utilities, the team has settled on conventions for commit messages.

From https://git-scm.com/book/ch5-2.html:

Capitalized, short (50 chars or less) summary

More detailed explanatory text, if necessary.  Wrap it to about 72
characters or so.  In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body.  The blank
line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit
the body entirely); tools like rebase will confuse you if you run the
two together.

Write your commit message in the imperative: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug"
or "Fixes bug."  This convention matches up with commit messages generated
by commands like git merge and git revert.

Further paragraphs come after blank lines.

  - Bullet points are okay, too

  - Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, followed by a
    single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here

  - Use a hanging indent

Furthermore, here are a few examples for a summary line:

• commit for a single utility

nohup: cleanup and refactor

• commit for a utility's tests

tests/rm: test new feature

Beyond changes to an individual utility or its tests, other summary lines for non-utility modules include:

README: add help

uucore: add new modules

uutils: add new utility

gitignore: add temporary files

Code coverage

Code coverage report can be generated using grcov.

Using Nightly Rust

To generate gcov-based coverage report

export CARGO_INCREMENTAL=0
export RUSTFLAGS="-Zprofile -Ccodegen-units=1 -Copt-level=0 -Clink-dead-code -Coverflow-checks=off -Zpanic_abort_tests -Cpanic=abort"
export RUSTDOCFLAGS="-Cpanic=abort"
cargo build <options...> # e.g., --features feat_os_unix
cargo test <options...> # e.g., --features feat_os_unix test_pathchk
grcov . -s . --binary-path ./target/debug/ -t html --branch --ignore-not-existing --ignore build.rs --excl-br-line "^\s*((debug_)?assert(_eq|_ne)?\#\[derive\()" -o ./target/debug/coverage/
# open target/debug/coverage/index.html in browser

if changes are not reflected in the report then run cargo clean and run the above commands.

Using Stable Rust

If you are using stable version of Rust that doesn't enable code coverage instrumentation by default then add -Z-Zinstrument-coverage flag to RUSTFLAGS env variable specified above.

Other implementations

The Coreutils have different implementations, with different levels of completions:

• GNU's
• OpenBSD
• Busybox
• Toybox (Android)
• V lang
• SerenityOS
• Initial Unix
• Perl Power Tools

However, when reimplementing the tools/options in Rust, don't read their source codes when they are using reciprocal licenses (ex: GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, etc).

Licensing

uutils is distributed under the terms of the MIT License; see the LICENSE file for details. This is a permissive license, which allows the software to be used with few restrictions.

Copyrights in the uutils project are retained by their contributors, and no copyright assignment is required to contribute.

If you wish to add or change dependencies as part of a contribution to the project, a tool like cargo-license can be used to show their license details. The following types of license are acceptable:

• MIT License
• Dual- or tri-license with an MIT License option ("Apache-2.0 or MIT" is a popular combination)
• "MIT equivalent" license (2-clause BSD, 3-clause BSD, ISC)
• License less restrictive than the MIT License (CC0 1.0 Universal)
• Apache License version 2.0

Licenses we will not use:

• An ambiguous license, or no license
• Strongly reciprocal licenses (GNU GPL, GNU LGPL)

If you wish to add a reference but it doesn't meet these requirements, please raise an issue to describe the dependency.