Busybox TODO
-Stuff that needs to be done. All of this is fair game for 1.2.
+Stuff that needs to be done. This is organized by who plans to get around to
+doing it eventually, but that doesn't mean they "own" the item. If you want to
+do one of these bounce an email off the person it's listed under to see if they
+have any suggestions how they plan to go about it, and to minimize conflicts
+between your work and theirs. But otherwise, all of these are fair game.
+
+Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>:
+ Add BB_NOMMU to platform.h and migrate __uClinux__ tests to that.
+ #if defined __UCLIBC__ && !defined __ARCH_USE_MMU__
+ Add a libbb/platform.c
+ Implement fdprintf() for platforms that haven't got one.
+ Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc.
+ Cleanup bb_asprintf()
+
+ Migrate calloc() and bb_calloc() occurrences to bb_xzalloc().
+ Remove obsolete _() wrapper crud for internationalization we don't do.
+ Figure out where we need utf8 support, and add 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.
+ lash is phased out. hush can be configured down to be nearly as small,
+ but less buggy :)
+ init
+ General cleanup (should use ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_SYSLOG and ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_DEBUG).
+ depmod
+ busybox lacks a way to update module deps when running from firmware without the
+ use of the depmod.pl (perl is to bloated for most embedded setups) and or orig
+ modutils. The orig depmod is rather pointless to have to add to a firmware image
+ in when we already have a insmod/rmmod and friends.
+ 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.
+ 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"?)
+
+ 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 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world
+ use, such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
+
+ Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
+ findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
+ sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
+ system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source
+ code). This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or
+ equivalents.
+
+ It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
+ of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
+ packages. 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 and
+ diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
+
+ 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.
+ mkdep
+ Write a mkdep that doesn't segfault if there's a directory it doesn't
+ have permission to read, isn't based on manually editing the output of
+ lexx and yacc, doesn't make such a mess under include/config, etc.
+ Group globals into unions of structures.
+ Go through and turn all the global and static variables into structures,
+ and have all those structures be in a big union shared between processes,
+ so busybox uses less bss. (This is a big win on nommu machines.) See
+ sed.c and mdev.c for examples.
+ Go through bugs.busybox.net and close out all of that somehow.
+ This one's open to everybody, but I'll wind up doing it...
+
+
+Bernhard Fischer <busybox@busybox.net> suggests to look at these:
+ New debug options:
+ -Wlarger-than-127
+ Cleanup any big users
+ -Wunused-parameter
+ Facilitate applet PROTOTYPES to provide means for having applets that
+ do a) not take any arguments b) need only one of argc or argv c) need
+ both argc and argv. All of these three options should go for the most
+ feature complete denominator.
+ Collate BUFSIZ IOBUF_SIZE MY_BUF_SIZE PIPE_PROGRESS_SIZE BUFSIZE PIPESIZE
+ make bb_common_bufsiz1 configurable, size wise.
+ make pipesize configurable, size wise.
+ Use bb_common_bufsiz1 throughout applets!
+
+As yet unclaimed:
-build system
- make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm
----
find
doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff.
----
-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 would be a big improvement.
-
- 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).
-
- Also, make sure we handle empty files properly:
+ 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.
+ 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
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
---
+ps / top
+ Add support for both RSS and VSIZE rather than just one or the other.
+ Or make it a build option.
+---
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
(How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
---
-bzip2
- Compression-side support.
----
-init
- General cleanup.
----
ar
Write support?
---
-mdev
- Micro-udev.
+stty / catv
+ stty's visible() function and catv's guts are identical. Merge them into
+ an appropriate libbb function.
+---
+struct suffix_mult
+ Several duplicate users of: grep -r "1024\*1024" * -B2 -A1
+ Merge to a single size_suffixes[] in libbb.
+ Users: head tail od_bloaty hexdump and (partially as it wouldn't hurt) svlogd
+---
+tail
+ ./busybox tail -f foo.c~ TODO
+ should not print fmt=header_fmt for subsequent date >> TODO; i.e. only
+ fmt+ if another (not the current) file did change
Architectural issues:
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.
---
-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.
----
-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
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 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
- such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
-
- Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
- findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
- sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
- system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source code).
- This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or equivalents.
-
- It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
- of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
- packages. 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 and
- diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
-
- 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
- involves 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 EXTRA_CFLAGS=-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
jumps out of the normal flow control and bypasses any cleanup code we
put at the end of our applets.
- It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and bb_xopen()
+ It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and xopen()
to add their entries to a linked list, which could be traversed and
freed/closed automatically. (This would need to be able to free just the
entries after a checkpoint to be usable for a forkless standalone shell.
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.
+---
+ use bb_error_msg where appropriate: See
+ egrep "(printf.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2)|[^_]write.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2))"
+---
+ use bb_perror_msg where appropriate: See
+ egrep "[^_]perror"
+---
+ Remove superfluous fmt occurances: e.g.
+ fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s not found\n", "unalias", *argptr);
+ -> fprintf(stderr, "unalias: %s not found\n", *argptr);
+---
+ possible code duplication ingroup() and is_a_group_member()
+---
+ Move __get_hz() to a better place and (re)use it in route.c, ash.c, msh.c
+---
+ See grep -r strtod
+ Alot of duplication that wants cleanup.
+---
Code cleanup:
---
sigblock(), siggetmask(), sigsetmask(), sigmask() -> sigprocmask et al
---
-
+vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality
+---
projects / oweals / busybox.git / blobdiff