Implement suggestion from Adam Slattery, (don't default to killing closing bug #1190.

[oweals/busybox.git] / TODO

diff --git a/TODO b/TODO
index b951767eac6ef7fcb5996dd5661b70752f160443..7237ab736cd6ee45a951799daa885b57911658af 100644 (file)
--- a/TODO
+++ b/TODO
@@ -4,25 +4,60 @@ 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.  
 
+* 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
 
 -----------
 
-* 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?)
+* 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
 
+------------------------------------------------------------------