Comment 21 for bug 590925

A few years later, but I just have to join in: I don't think nc.openbsd should ever have been added as an alternative to nc.traditional, as they are not compatible. They should be separate packages - nc.traditional should be netcat, and nc.openbsd should be netcat-openbsd. They should have separate binaries that are not part of an alternatives group, and if someone wants to use nc.openbsd then they can call it as such - thereby specifically requesting the openbsd interface instead of the traditional one.

Probably too late to fix that now. But just in general, barring the obvious case of one implementation having extra functionality and options that are not present in the other, alternatives should ALWAYS share the same interface (think of the vast number of options to GNU binaries that are ignored or mirror other options, PURELY to provide the same interface that has been used by other implementations for decades). Kind of a 'duh' moment for any programmer reading this thread.