3 Stuff that needs to be done
5 tr - missing SuS3 features in busybox 1.0pre10
7 tr doesnt support [:blank:], [:digit:] or other predefined classes, [=equiv=]
8 support is also missing.
11 doesn't understand () or -exec, and these are actually used out in the real
12 world. The "make uninstall" of lots of things (including busybox itself)
13 breaks because of this, and sometimes even "make install" (like udev).
16 The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different
17 shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't
18 work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not
19 being reentrant. Unifying the various shells and figuring out a configurable
20 way of adding the minimal set of bash features a given script uses is a big
21 job, but it be a big improvement.
23 Note: Rob Landley (rob@landley.net) is working on this one, but very slowly...
26 Can't handle compressing multiple files at once. (I don't mean making a
27 multiple file archive, I mean compressing more than one file at a time.)
28 Some global variables aren't re-initialized between runs.
31 same problem as gzip. "gunzip one.gz two.gz three.gz" doesn't work for
32 two.gz and three.gz due to global variables not getting reset.
35 We should have a diff -u command. We have patch, we should have diff
36 (we only need to support unified diffs though).
39 Would be nice. The basic susv3 options, plus fuser -k.
42 should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
43 shouldn't take up too much space.
46 It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or
47 anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly
48 compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that
49 calls cat/zcatbzcat | more
52 More sucks if you're used to less. A tiny less implementation would be
56 Compression-side support.
62 Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at
63 "http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and
64 figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that
65 we might actually care about.
67 Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
68 exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
71 Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory
72 traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
73 be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file",
74 "add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on.
76 This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar
77 write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs someday,
78 if it becomes relevant.
81 Several existing applets and potential additions (sort, vi, less...) read
82 a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity
83 for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb...
85 Individual compilation of applets.
86 It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets,
87 for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu
88 utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big
91 Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb
92 could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less
93 got the code for (like zlib).
95 buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option
96 Busybox is now capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
97 such as developing software or in a live CD. A system built from busybox
98 (1.00 with updated sort.c), uclibc 0.9.27, gcc, binutils, make, and a few
99 other development tools (http://www.landley.net/code/firmware has an example
100 system using autoconf, automake, bison, flex, libtools, m4, zlib,
101 and groff: dunno what subset of that is actually necessary) is capable of
102 rebuilding itself, from scratch, under itself.
104 It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
105 of using busybox instead of bzip2, coreutils, file, findutils, gawk, grep,
106 inetutils, modutils, net-tools, procps, sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar,
107 util-linux, and vim. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we
108 can fix. (It would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to
109 replace bash, diffutils, gzip, less, and patch as well.)
112 We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
113 allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much.
114 We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls
115 into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER.
117 And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be
118 optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no
119 free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just
120 call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so
121 we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code.