[maemo-developers] Maemo "Reconstructed" (Busybox)

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Carsten Valdemar Munk wrote:
> For the last week I've been working on a proposal for a possible  
> future system architecture of Maemo, covering areas such as boot  
> process, base system, user experience base and SDK.
> 
> This was sparked by the discussions in  
> https://wiki.maemo.org/Mainstream_Linux_Alignment ,  
> http://qgil.jaiku.com/presence/47635104
> and my last post to this list,  
> http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2008-October/035409.html
> 
> You can view, edit and contribute (or object to parts) to to the  
> proposal on http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Reconstructed

 From the page:
--------------
Discussion: Is busybox really needed on a tablet? In initfs, sure, but
in the actual system? Having sane coreutils and bsdutils (and debconf)
-really- helps porting. Now that dash exists, is there a reason for busybox
as sh? This avoids any conflicts with coreutils, bsdutils etc if they are
going to be used.

* A simple (which may be unfair and inaccurate) experiment with
   dpkg-deb -x of procps, coreutils, util-linux, bsdutils into a path,
   and then mkjffs'ing it after stripping man pages, locales and info pages,
   - 2.2mb flash, and
   - with busybox getting same treatment, 300k flash.
--------------

If you check what Busybox provides on the device:
$ dpkg -s busybox|grep Provides|tr ',' '\n'

You should compare Busybox footprint against following Debian
packages:
- findutils
- gzip
- hostname
- ifupdown
- module-init-tools
- net-tools
- procps
- sed
- tar
- coreutils
- grep
- mount
- login
- debianutils
- util-linux
- vim-tiny
- mawk
- mktemp
- bsdutils
- sysvinit-utils
- iputils-ping
- psmisc
- time


--------------
  Scratchbox (cross-compilation environment)

Build programs for another architecture/target than on the one compiling.

Packages for Maemo should not expect Scratchbox to be where they're 
compiled (There's been seen examples of this amongst Nokia code.). This 
increases portability of Maemo platform. A package that builds in 
Scratchbox should also build on a tablet.
--------------

Debian packages in general aren't buildable with Busybox, so
above would be pending on this:
	https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2896

And on modified build-essentials metapackage that brings in the suitable
GNU tools I guess.


> /Carsten V. Munk
> Developer on the Deblet Project, Diablo user and happy tablet user.



	- Eero

PS. Is "The Deblet Project" a registered legal entity and do
you require copyright assignments?

If not, it may be better if developers use just their own copyright
with a commonly agreed license instead of "The Deblet Project" copyright
as suggested in the Deblet www-page.  The code could still say "part
of the Deblet project" or something similar.