[maemo-developers] busybox applet selection (again)

[From: Damien Moore]

On 1/2/08, Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen at nokia.com> wrote:
>This is fairly unlikely case, but IMHO reason enough not to have two
>busybox versions with different set of tools.  Main thing is that the
>developer can get the required tool, not whether it's in Busybox
>I think.

I agree that the important thing is access to the tools. I thought a
repackaged busybox would be a "cheap" way to get those tools, but I'm
equally happy to have the full versions of them if they are readily
available (to date, they are not). This also suggests broadening the
conversation to the availability and organization of tools that aren't
available in busybox or in the developer repos but are generally useful for
developers/advanced users. For example ssh and svn are available in some
form in extras or in the garage, but having them in the developer/sdk
repository seems more appropriate and will most likely mean they are better
maintained (no offense to community maintainers). How arduous is the process
for getting new tools into the developer repo? Will advanced users looking
for command line tools think to look in the developer repo?

>Diff is both a Debian essential and in POSIX standard so I guess it's
>addition could be considered for maemo base system.  If(?) Busybox diff
>is good enough for dpkg (for showing config file diffs on upgrade),
>it could be provided by Bysybox.

If we have a full version of one, we may as well have a full version of the
other (since dpkg apparently does fine without diff now)

>Other similar binaries would be clear, logname, nice, nohup, od,
>split and sum. Except for the first one, in Debian they are all
>in coreutils package.  Maybe you could make a bug about these with
>me on CC, I can then add it to our internal system (they are "API"
>changes so they need to go through certain review process).

I will do this sometime in the next week.

I've added a project to the garage where I'll upload replacement versions of
busybox with more options switched on for the community to test:
http://garage.maemo.org/projects/busybox-test/  (it will take me a day or
two to upload sources and get some releases up). Based on the conversation
here, it seems it makes the most sense to just switch on more of the core
utils and leave most other things out (networking tools, archive utilities
etc)
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