[maemo-developers] Busybox version

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Wei Zhou wrote:
> Little out of topic, busybox in diablo image is  1.6.1, while the latest
> one is 1.11.x, does Nokia plan to upgrade this? AYK, there are many bugs
> on Bugzilla shows the old busybox did not support some features (like,
> `ldd', `sort -k', etc), but the latest one does. 

If you need these urgently, instead of "ldd", you can use:
	/lib/ld-2.5.so --list /path-to/dynamic-elf-binary

(Ldd script is just convenience wrapper around ld, it converts relative
paths to absolute and gives the binaries & libs to the dynamic linker
one at the time.)

And instead of "sort -k", you might try re-arranging the fields first
with trivial awk one-liner.


> compare with the size
> 
> busybox 1.6.1,      223.4k
> busybox 1.11.x,    763.4k

I think the features and especially the size depends more from features
enabled in busybox configuration that the busybox version.  (bugs in
these features, these are more specific to busybox version. :-))


> I think it's not a big problem in N810 about the size(256M/8G).

The 256MB internal flash (where all the packages will be installed) is
half  full and with JFFS2 file system there should be some free space
for it to work well (to more full it is, the more it slows down and
more RAM it uses).

Basically features that aren't needed by normal users (who don't use
command line) nor needed by the installed packages, are left out of
Busybox.


Updating to new Busybox version "always" breaks things that need then to
be  fixed, so it's not going to be updated for maemo 4.x (Chinook /
Diablo).  It will be updated in the next major release, Fremantle.


	- Eero