Busybox TODO
-Stuff that needs to be done
+Stuff that needs to be done. All of this is fair game for 1.2.
+build system
+ make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm
+ Make sure that the flags get pinned in e.g. Rules.mak so when expanding them
+ later on you get the cached result without the need to re-evaluate them.
+----
find
doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff.
----
work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not
being reentrant. Unifying the various shells and figuring out a configurable
way of adding the minimal set of bash features a given script uses is a big
- job, but it be a big improvement.
+ job, but it would be a big improvement.
- Note: Rob Landley (rob@landley.net) is working on this one, but very slowly...
+ Note: Rob Landley (rob@landley.net) is working on a new unified shell called
+ bbsh, but it's a low priority...
---
diff
- We should have a diff -u command. We have patch, we should have diff
- (we only need to support unified diffs though).
----
-fuser
- Would be nice. The basic susv3 options, plus fuser -k.
+ Also, make sure we handle empty files properly:
+ From the patch man page:
+
+ you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares
+ the file to be deleted with an empty file dated the Epoch. The
+ file will be removed unless patch is conforming to POSIX and the
+ -E or --remove-empty-files option is not given.
---
patch
- should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
+ Should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
shouldn't take up too much space.
+
+ And while we're at it, a new patch filename quoting format is apparently
+ coming soon: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=112927316408690&w=2
---
man
It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or
anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly
compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that
calls cat/zcat/bzcat | less
+
+ (How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
---
bzip2
Compression-side support.
-
+---
+init
+ General cleanup.
+---
+ar
+ Write support?
+---
+mdev
+ Micro-udev.
+---
+crond
+ turn FEATURE_DEBUG_OPT into ENABLE_FEATURE_CROND_DEBUG_OPT
Architectural issues:
+bb_close() with fsync()
+ We should have a bb_close() in place of normal close, with a CONFIG_ option
+ to not just check the return value of close() for an error, but fsync().
+ Close can't reliably report anything useful because if write() accepted the
+ data then it either went out to the network or it's in cache or a pipe
+ buffer. Either way, there's no guarantee it'll make it to its final
+ destination before close() gets called, so there's no guarantee that any
+ error will be reported.
+
+ You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(),
+ but that can have a big performance impact. So make it a config option.
+---
+Unify base64 handling.
+ There's base64 encoding and decoding going on in:
+ networking/wget.c:base64enc()
+ coreutils/uudecode.c:read_base64()
+ coreutils/uuencode.c:tbl_base64[]
+ networking/httpd.c:decodeBase64()
+ And probably elsewhere. That needs to be unified into libbb functions.
+---
Do a SUSv3 audit
Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at
"http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and
Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
---
+---
+Internationalization
+ How much internationalization should we do?
+
+ The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this.
+ (Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?)
+
+ We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this
+ into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
+ also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.
+
+ We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we can
+ cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to concern
+ ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a config
+ option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)
+
+ What level should things happen at? How much do we care about
+ internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
+ at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
+ "unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
+ --unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
+ implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font
+ loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)
+---
Unify archivers
Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory
traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
"add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on.
This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar
- write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs someday,
- if it becomes relevant.
+ write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs or
+ mksquashfs someday, if they become relevant.
---
Text buffer support.
Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read
One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
---
+initramfs
+ Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on
+ bbsh, mdev, and switch_root.
+---
Memory Allocation
We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much.
We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls
into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER.
+ For a start, see e.g. make CFLAGS_EXTRA=-Wlarger-than-64
And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be
optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no
render the existing FEATURE_CLEAN_UP code redundant.
For right now, exit() handles it just fine.
+
+
+
+Minor stuff:
+ watchdog.c could autodetect the timer duration via:
+ if(!ioctl (fd, WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT, &tmo)) timer_duration = 1 + (tmo / 2);
+ Unfortunately, that needs linux/watchdog.h and that contains unfiltered
+ kernel types on some distros, which breaks the build.
+
+
+Code cleanup:
+
+Replace deprecated functions.
+
+bzero() -> memset()
+---
+sigblock(), siggetmask(), sigsetmask(), sigmask() -> sigprocmask et al
+---
+vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality
+---
+
projects / oweals / busybox.git / blobdiff