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

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.
If possible, look at the GNU test suite execution in the CI and make the test work if failing.
Use clap for argument management.
Make sure that the code coverage is covering all of the cases, including errors.
The code must be clippy-warning-free and rustfmt-compliant.
Don't hesitate to move common functions into uucore if they can be reused by other binaries.
Unsafe code should be documented with Safety comments.
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/

Setting up your development environment

To setup your local development environment for this project please follow DEVELOPMENT.md guide

It covers installation of necessary tools and prerequisites as well as using those tools to test your code changes locally

Improving the GNU compatibility

Please make sure you have installed GNU utils and prerequisites and can execute commands described in Comparing with GNU section of DEVELOPMENT.md

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:

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.
Build both the GNU and Rust coreutils using: bash util/build-gnu.sh
Run the test with bash util/run-gnu-test.sh <your test>
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. ...
Or, if the test is simple, extract the relevant information to create a new test case running both GNU & Rust implementation
Start to modify the Rust implementation to match the expected behavior
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

To generate code coverage report locally please follow Code coverage report section of DEVELOPMENT.md

Other implementations

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

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.

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