[maemo-developers] Busybox version

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 14 August 2008 14:55:44 Eero Tamminen wrote:
> 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.

I agree that it would require all the other packages to be modified.  But I am 
not sure how to make any other solution work.

By the way, there would be nothing stopping Debian accepting changes to make 
the 90-odd packages in standard Debian use alternatives.  There may be no 
reason to do it in standard Debian but nothing would break if they did use 
it.  However, it is unlikely all the maintainers could be persuaded to agree.

> 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.

Let me see if I understand how this could work.  Let's take a few examples: ls 
(part of coreutils in Debian), tar (its own package in Debian), pinky (part 
of coreutils in Debian but not included in maemo), xyzzy (a fictitious 
command that may be included in busybox in the future).

ITOS would ship with a package called busybox-maemo which 
installed /bin/busybox.

ITOS would also ship with busybox-symlinks-coreutils which depends on 
busybox-maemo and links everything in the normal debain coreutils (including 
pinky) to /bin/busybox.  Note that at this point ls would work and pinky 
would appear to exist but would not actually work.

ITOS also ships with busybox-symlinks-tar which links tar to /bin/busybox.

Then the community creates a busybox-maemo-plus which has more options and 
more commands (including, say pinky and xyzzy).  It 
Provides/Replaces/Conflicts busybox-maemo and installs /bin/busybox.  
Anything which needs pinky can depend on busybox-maemo-plus.

The community also create busybox-symlinks-xyzzy which depends on 
busybox-maemo-plus and which links /usr/bin/xyzzy to /bin/busybox.

And the community creates GNU tar.  It Provides/Replaces/Conflicts 
busybox-symlinks-tar and installs tar.  Anything which needs gnu tar can 
depend on tar and anything which doesn't care which tar it needs can depend 
on busybox-symlinks-tar (which GNU tar still provides).

That could work but ONLY if Nokia allow busybox-maemo and busybox-symlinks-tar 
to be replaced (and this works even through OS upgrades).  That seems 
unlikely to me.

Have I missed something in how this could work?

Graham