-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 in 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.
-
-
- -Erik
-
------------
-
-* Allow tar to create archives with sockets, devices, and other special files
-* Make insmod actually work
-* dnsdomainname
-* traceroute/netstat
-* rdate
-* hwclock
-* killall
-* stty
-* tr
-* cut
-* expr (maybe?) (ash builtin?)
-
-
-
------------------------
-
-Compile with debugging on, run 'nm --size-sort ./busybox'
-and then start with the biggest things and make them smaller...
-
-
------------------------
-
-
-busybox.defs.h is too big and hard to follow.
-
-I either need to add a better build system (like the Linux kernel?)
-or I need to split up busybox.defs.h into coherent chunks (i.e.
-busybox.defs.h just has a bunch of:
-
-#include "fileutils.h"
-#include "shellutils.h"
-
-which would then have smaller sets of #defines...
-Hmm. Needs to be carefully thought out.
-
------------------------
-
-
--rw-r--r-- 1000/1000 4398 2000-01-06 21:55 uniq.c
--rw-r--r-- 1000/1000 1568 1999-10-20 18:08 update.c
--rw-r----- 0/1000 1168 2000-01-29 21:03 update.o
--rw-r--r-- 1000/1000 22820 2000-01-05 11:36 utility.c
--rw-r----- 0/1000 7372 2000-01-29 21:03 utility.o
-tar: Skipping to next file header
-tar: Skipping to next file header
-tar: Archive - EOF not on block boundary
-tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
-
-
-#1 You are storing by id instead of name like normal tar. Did you realize this?
-(or am I missing some compile option? )ctar did not do this, and I don't think
-it's a good idea for LRP.
-
-#2
-ctar did not produce the EOF error like your tar does. I believe you need to
-pad the end of the archive with at least 2 tarsized (512byte) blocks. (I
-think???)
-
-#3
-There is no exclude file(s) option to tar. LRP's packaging system can not
-function without this. Will you have the time to add this soon?
-
-
------------------------
-
-cd /mnt
-mkdir BACKUP
-mv * BACKUP
-
-Today, "mv" behaved as a cp -a and my disk becomed full. It does not
-work properly either when renaming a directory into something else
-(it produces a lot of disk activity when doing this).
-
-
------------------------
-
-
-Feature request:
-
-/bin/busybox --install -s which makes all links to commands that it
- can support (an optionnal -s should be used for symbolic links instead
- of hard links).
-
-
------------------------
-
-
-> Have you ever thought of doig network logging in busybox syslogd ? It
-> would quite make sense on embedded systems... :)
-
-So far I had not considered it. Basically, you wish to have
-messages from the embedded box logged to a remote network
-syslog box, right? I can see that this would be useful.
-I'll add this to the TODO list,
-
-
------------------------
-
-
- In utility.c:copyFile: It uses followLinks for both source and
- destination files... is that right for `mv'? Will need to revisit
- the GNU, freeBSD, and MINIX versions for this... Should read the
- Unix98 and POSIX specs also.
-
------------------------
-
- I think that the add_inode &c in utility.c needs to also stow the
- st_dev field, and that du.c should NOT call `reset_inode_list'
- because there can be hard links from inside one argv/ to inside
- another argv/. du.c probably ought to have an -x switch like GNU du
- does also...
-
-
+Busybox TODO
+
+Stuff that needs to be done
+
+tr - missing SuS3 features in busybox 1.0pre10
+
+tr doesnt support [:blank:], [:digit:] or other predefined classes, [=equiv=]
+support is also missing.
+----
+find
+ doesn't understand () or -exec, and these are actually used out in the real
+ world. The "make uninstall" of lots of things (including busybox itself)
+ breaks because of this, and sometimes even "make install" (like udev).
+----
+comm
+ Perl needs "comm" to build. It's small and simple, but we haven't got it.
+---
+sh
+ The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different
+ shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't
+ 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.
+---
+gzip
+ Can't handle compressing multiple files at once. (I don't mean making a
+ multiple file archive, I mean compressing more than one file at a time.)
+ Some global variables aren't re-initialized between runs.
+---
+gunzip
+ same problem as gzip. "gunzip one.gz two.gz three.gz" doesn't work for
+ two.gz and three.gz due to global variables not getting reset.
+---
+diff
+ We should have a diff -u command. We have patch, we should have diff
+ (we only need to support unified diffs though).
+---
+patch
+ should have -i support, and simple fuzz factor support to apply patches
+ at an offset shouldn't take up too much space.
+---
+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/zcatbzcat | more
+---
+less
+ More sucks if you're used to less. A tiny less implementation would be
+ very nice.
+---
+bzip2
+ Compression-side support.
+
+
+Architectural issues:
+
+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
+ figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that
+ we might actually care about.
+
+ Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
+ exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
+--
+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
+ be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file",
+ "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.
+---
+Text buffer support.
+ Several existing applets and potential additions (sort, vi, less...) read
+ a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity
+ for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb...
+---
+Individual compilation of applets.
+ It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets,
+ for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu
+ utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big
+ executable.
+
+ Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb
+ could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less
+ got the code for (like zlib).
+---
+buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option
+ Busybox is now capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
+ such as developing software or in a live CD. A system built from busybox
+ (1.00 with updated sort.c), uclibc 0.9.27, gcc, binutils, make, and a few
+ other development tools (http://www.landley.net/code/firmware has an example
+ system using autoconf, automake, bison, flex, libtools, m4, zlib,
+ and groff: dunno what subset of that is actually necessary) is capable of
+ rebuilding itself, from scratch, under itself.
+
+ It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
+ of using busybox instead of bzip2, coreutils, file, findutils, gawk, grep,
+ inetutils, modutils, net-tools, procps, sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar,
+ util-linux, and vim. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we
+ can fix. (It would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to
+ replace bash, diffutils, gzip, less, and patch as well.)
+---
+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.
+
+ 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
+ free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just
+ call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so
+ we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code.
projects / oweals / busybox.git / blobdiff