-TODO list for busybox in no particular order
-
-* Add in a mini syslogd
-* Allow tar to create archives with sockets, devices, and other special files
-* Add in a mini modprobe, insmod, rmmod
-* poweroff
-* Change init so halt, reboot (and poweroff) work with an initrd
- when init is not PID 1
-*
+TODO list for busybox in no particular order. Just because something
+is listed here doesn't mean that it is going to be added to busybox,
+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 to libcrypt).
+
+* 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.
+
+* The default busybox shell, lash, is really too weak for serious use,
+ although it is possible to run many simple systems with it. BusyBox
+ 0.52 now contains a rewritten shell, hush, which understands most
+ Bourne grammar, with only about a 4 Kbyte binary size penalty. You can
+ engage hush at pre-compile time by "ln -sf hush.c sh.c; touch hush.c".
+ Hush is young, and has plenty of bugs to shake out, so think twice before
+ using it for production systems. We welcome bug reports and patches.
+
+ -Erik
+
+-----------
+
+Possible apps to include some time:
+
+* hwclock
+* 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
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------
projects / oweals / busybox.git / blobdiff