[maemo-developers] Busybox version

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Graham Cobb wrote:
> 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.  

This would require that also all those other packages[1] need to be
modified to use alternatives which is pretty ugly.  It would also
be better if the solution is something that Debian could and would
adopt.

[1] the latest upstream Busybox provides so many tools that in Debian
     they are split among almost 90 different packages...


> 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.

I think better solution would be to provide the Busybox symlinks in
separate packages and the packages would be split so that they
correspond to packages in Debian.  For example the Busybox symlinks
for utilities that in Debian are in the "coreutils" package would be
e.g. in "busybox-symlinks-coreutils" package.

If anybody has even better ideas, I'm interested. :-)


	- Eero