[maemo-developers] busybox applet selection (again)

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Damien Moore wrote:
> On 1/2/08, Kalle Valo <kalle.valo at nokia.com> wrote:
>> I have to agree with Eero here. It's much more useful to have the
>> original tools available instead of (too) simple busybox variants.
> 
> what I'm suggesting would be an optional package that, if set up correctly,
> won't break anything (but will block the installation of overlapping tools
> in other packages). Users who want original tool sets could take the
> standard busybox package and install separate tools packages.

IMHO it would be undesirable to have two incompatible versions of
the base system (extra one that is incompatible both with Debian
and maemo).  But as an example and testbed for what configuration
options maemo busybox itself should have it would be nice, especially
if community does both the testing and reports what is broken in it.


> If having the original tools is always better perhaps busybox shouldn't be used at all?
 >
 > Yet another alternative: a package that replaces busybox with 
original tools


It would be nice if somebody would have time to analyze the current
difference between the two in regards to binary size and option
compatibility.  Here are some (I think nowadays partly obsolete)
comments on latter ("2.1. known problems):
   http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/OptimizeRCScripts


However, I don't think that's necessary.  Currently Busybox seems to
work pretty well in maemo, only problem is that we have some known
issues in Busybox and potential unknown issues with compatibility
to Debian and its derivatives[1].

Debian essentials alone have about 150 additional binaries compared
to what Busybox provides of which many aren't e.g. listed in the POSIX
standard and include for example things like:
- cytune (8)           - Tune Cyclades driver parameters
- ddate (1)            - converts Gregorian dates to Discordian dates
- fdformat (8)         - Low-level formats a floppy disk
- debugfs (8)          - ext2/ext3 file system debugger
- infotocap (1)        - convert a terminfo entry into a termcap entry
- rmt-tar (8)          - remote magtape protocol module
- wall (1)             - write a console message to users
which are not that useful on a single-user mobile device.


	- Eero

[1] Some of that is unavoidable.  Even Ubuntu releases have different
     versions of the Debian packages than the Debian releases and
     it includes Python in it's essentials (IMHO a mistake, the set
     of essentials should be the minimum needed to install additional
     packages)