[maemo-developers] Busybox version

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 14 August 2008 10:53:46 Eero Tamminen wrote:
> "advance user" versions of busybox would basically mean community
> replacement.  (there's also a public bug about being able to cleanly
> replace some things that busybox provides with GNU versions)

It would be nice if ITOS implemented the "alternatives" (i.e. using 
update-alternatives) mechanism for the commands installed by busybox.  That 
way the system could ship with a small busybox, with a low priority for each 
command it supports, the community could create a larger busybox with more 
options with higher priorities, and the community could also build the "full" 
GNU applications with higher priority still.  

Different users could install different versions as they need them (or they 
could be dependencies of packages which need them, of course).

Ideally Nokia would ship ITOS with this already setup (so, for example instead 
of shipping with ls as a link to busybox, it would be setup with ls.nokia as 
a link to busybox and ls.nokia installed as an alternative for ls using 
update-alternatives).  On the other hand, I suppose it would be possible to 
create a package which made these changes to an existing system -- that 
package would have to be previously installed before any package which wanted 
to add alternatives, however.

Graham