apple-core

Apple's BSD command line tools, built as a single coherent package — the Darwin counterpart to GNU coreutils.

The sources are Apple's own open-source userland (file_cmds, text_cmds, shell_cmds, system_cmds, diskdev_cmds, network_cmds, …) and the libraries it links (libutil, libmd, libtelnet, …), carried as submodules under src/ that track apple-oss-distributions directly. What this project adds is a build system: Apple ships these as a scattering of Xcode projects that expect the internal SDK, and apple-core replaces that with one bmake tree that builds against the public SDK on a stock macOS install.

A handful of tools missing from Apple's set are vendored from FreeBSD in src/bsd_additions/ (factor, indent, ee, timeout).

Building

Requires Xcode (or the Command Line Tools) and bmake.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/xnuports/apple-core.git
cd apple-core && bmake && bmake check

Everything lands in build/release/, laid out as the root of a stock macOS install — bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin, usr/libexec, usr/lib — with each file where macOS keeps its own copy. There is no install target: the release tree is the product.

Useful targets:

bmake              # libraries, then ports (if enabled), then programs
bmake check        # every inventory entry produced its files; nothing stale
bmake list-progs   # the program inventory with install locations
bmake list-libs    # the library inventory
bmake list-ports   # the port inventory
bmake clean        # remove build/, keeping the ports work directories
bmake clean-ports  # remove the ports work directories
bmake distclean    # remove build/ entirely

Run bmake check after any build you care about. One entry failing does not stop the rest, so without it a broken tool simply goes missing from the release tree.

Optional tiers

The default build is the strict coreutils-like set. Four groups are gated off, each enabled independently:

bmake MK_DIAGNOSTICS=yes        # fs_usage, latency, zprint, vm_stat, gcore, …
bmake MK_DAEMONS=yes            # telnetd, tftpd, rtadvd, getty, …
bmake MK_PRIVATE_FRAMEWORKS=yes # tools needing FSKit/APFS/kextmanager
bmake MK_PORTS=yes              # zsh, tcsh, uucp, lsof, xar, pcre: their own build systems

kext_tools and autofs are not part of this tree; they are OS components and live in the LibreDarwin OS repository.

State

The default set builds clean: all 253 programs and all 20 libraries, eight of them also installed as dylibs under Apple's names (libutil, libz, libbz2, libmd, libtidy, libipsec, and libcopyfile and libremovefile in usr/lib/system). With MK_PORTS=yes, zsh (with its pcre module), tcsh (with csh), uucp, lsof, xar, pcre and ncurses (clear, infocmp, tic, toe, tput, tset, linked against the system's libncurses.5.4 as stock macOS's are) build through their own build systems too. No entry is left unbuilt.

Where no header is published at all, what the build needs is recovered from Apple's shipped binaries and says so where it lives: the quarantine SPI; libxpc's pipe, entitlement and os_transaction SPI (xpc/private.h, os/transaction_private.h); Network's network/conninfo.h; APFS's purgeable-file ioctl; the log-pack types; PowerManagement's libIOReport, LockdownMode, SkyLight, MobileGestalt, Apple vendor HID usages and the newer power-source types IOKitUser-100231.120.3 predates; KernelManagementClient; and the ifconfig netem models. Apple open source supplies the rest where it exists: IOKitUser-100231.120.3's power headers, configd-1405.120.5's SystemConfiguration private headers, libdispatch-1542.0.4's private headers, and xnu's corecrypto, IOReport and hibernation headers.

The diagnostics, daemons and private-frameworks tiers add 41 entries, and all of them build too: the diagnostics (fs_usage, gcore, latency, lsmp, stackshot, zlog, …), the daemons, and PowerManagement's pmset and ioupsd. What they need beyond the public SDK comes from xnu, libmalloc and dyld where Apple publish it, and is recovered from the shipped binaries where they do not (ktrace session SPI, Background Task Management, CoreSymbolication, process responsibility, the os_log hook, task_read_for_pid()). vm_stat joined them with system_cmds-1042.120.1, which reads memory-tagging counters from a newer struct vm_statistics64 than the SDK declares.

A few build with caveats rather than as exact ports, each documented in its own mk/tool.d/<tool>.mk: timeout cannot follow descendants past its direct child (Darwin has no subreaper API), the FSKit-backed tools report FSKit as unavailable — Apple's own fallback for that case, ifconfig's two newer netem model values are recovered from the shipped binary rather than any published header, and tiffutil -info differs cosmetically from the stock binary's because we link the installed libtiff rather than a patched one (-dump is byte-identical). libutil carries FreeBSD's login_cap/getcap and sbuf families, which Apple's does not; su, login, newgrp, getty and atrun need them. libz is plain zlib, without Apple's vectorised AddOn, which the drop does not wire up to the files that use it. ioupsd carries a patch declaring needsMerge, which the published upsd.m tests but never declares: stock ioupsd sets it only when an "Inductive In-Band" battery case reuses an already-registered record, so merging those cases is left undone and every other device behaves as stock. rtadvd's sources are gone from network_cmds-741.100.2, which keeps only its run-rtadvd script while macOS still ships the daemon; mk/patches/rtadvd restores them verbatim from network_cmds-705.100.5. telnetd builds Apple's eight-file target, leaving out authenc.c, which the target never compiled and which does not compile. talkd installs as /usr/libexec/ntalkd, the name and place stock macOS gives it. fs_usage, latency, sc_usage and zprint link libutil statically where stock links libutil.dylib.

Build system

bmake, with two engines driven by flat inventories — the same architecture as the sibling xcode-tools project:

mk/tool.mk	compiles a program or a library from sources; driven by mk/progs.mk and mk/libs.mk
mk/port.mk	drives a component's own build system (autoconf, CMake, make); driven by mk/ports.mk
mk/tool.d/, mk/port.d/	per-entry flags
mk/with-*.mk	reusable link bundles
mk/patches/<name>/	patches to an entry's sources
mk/scripts/pbxinfo.py	prints an Apple target's sources and settings from its .xcodeproj

Adding a tool is one line in mk/progs.mk, plus a mk/tool.d/<tool>.mk only if it needs flags — sources are discovered automatically.

Submodules are never written to. Every Makefile lives outside them and reaches in read-only. A source that has to change does so through a patch in mk/patches/<name>/, written against the submodule root (as git format-patch in the submodule produces it) and applied to a private copy under build/src/ or build/ports/.

Libraries always produce build/lib/<name>.a, which is what the programs link, so the release tree runs in place. Those Apple ships as dylibs are also linked into build/release/usr/lib, under Apple's install names.

Layout

Path
src/	tool and library sources (submodules)
lib/	libxo, and the driver for mk/libs.mk
ports/	the driver for mk/ports.mk
include/	private headers vendored where the SDK ships none
frameworks/	private framework headers, reached with -F
mk/	the build system
docs/	progress notes and the submodule audit
tools/	helper scripts

Licensing

Apple's sources are APSL-2.0 and BSD; the FreeBSD additions are BSD; a few files are MIT. LICENSE collects the full texts, with per-license copies in LICENSE.APSL-2.0, LICENSE.BSD-2, LICENSE.BSD-3 and LICENSE.MIT.

Submodules under src/ and lib/ keep their own upstream licences.