Small size optimization from Aaron Lehmann

[oweals/busybox.git] / TODO

diff --git a/TODO b/TODO
index b951767eac6ef7fcb5996dd5661b70752f160443..3d9af20a78f75a40640a962538f34d92beab71dc 100644 (file)
--- a/TODO
+++ b/TODO
@@ -4,25 +4,54 @@ or that doing so is even a good idea. It just means that I _might_ get
 around to it some time. If you have any good ideas, please let me know.
 
 * login/sulogin/passwd/getty/etc are part of tinylogin, and so are not
-    needed or wanted in busybox (or else I'd have to link in libcrypt).
+    needed or wanted in busybox (or else I'd have to link to libcrypt).
 
-* Networking apps are probably going to be split out some time soon into a
-    separate package (named perhaps tiny-netkit?).  This currently includes 
-    hostid, hostname, mnc, and ping.
+* We _were_ going to split networking apps into a new package called 
+    netkit-tiny.  Per discussions on the mailing list, this isn't going
+    to happen.  False alarm.  Sorry about the confusion.  
 
 
  -Erik
 
 -----------
 
-* Allow tar to create archives with sockets, devices, and other special files
-* Make insmod actually work
-* dnsdomainname
-* traceroute/nslookup/netstat
-* rdate
+Possible apps to include some time:
+
 * hwclock
-* killall
-* stty
-* tr
-* expr (maybe?)  (ash builtin?)
+* start-stop-daemon
+* group/commonize strings, remove dups (for i18n, l10n)
+
+-----------
+
+With sysvinit, reboot, poweroff and halt all used a named pipe, 
+/dev/initctl, to communicate with the init process.  Busybox
+currently uses signals to communicate with init.  This makes
+busybox incompatible with sysvinit.  We should probably use
+a named pipe as well so we can be compatible.
+
+-----------------------
+
+Run the following:
+
+    rm -f busybox && make LDFLAGS+=-nostdlib 2>&1 | \
+       sed -ne 's/.*undefined reference to `\(.*\)..*/\1/gp' | sort | uniq
+
+reveals the list of all external (i.e., libc) things that BusyBox depends on.
+It would be a very nice thing to reduce this list to an absolute minimum, to
+reduce the footprint of busybox, especially when staticly linking with
+libraries such as uClibc.
+
+-----------------------
+
+Compile with debugging on, run 'nm --size-sort ./busybox'
+and then start with the biggest things and make them smaller...
+
+-----------------------
+
+ du.c probably ought to have an -x switch like GNU du does...
+
+-----------------------
+
+xargs could use a -l option
 
+------------------------------------------------------------------