X-Git-Url: https://git.librecmc.org/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=TODO;h=4653abfb2c8ac13cdcd809a9caa55524e3e35d26;hb=5ba5f4d2e72791fef3065a2221a3d386e0d17982;hp=7962b9ecfe4d7192c30fd10b8572ad280f0115d0;hpb=9910cd2869fe90695e99e7be671ac774a78e8101;p=oweals%2Fbusybox.git diff --git a/TODO b/TODO index 7962b9ecf..4653abfb2 100644 --- a/TODO +++ b/TODO @@ -1,64 +1,107 @@ -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/etc are part of tinylogin. We are in the - process of merging these applications into busybox, since the - new build system allows us to add Libraries (i.e. libcrypt), - when certain applets are enabled. - -* 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. - - -Erik - ------------ - -Possible apps to include some time: - -* hwclock -* group/commonize strings, remove dups (for i18n, l10n) -* login/sulogin/passwd/etc are part of tinylogin. These are - being merged into busybox as time allows. - ------------ - -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 - ------------------------------------------------------------------- - -libbb/unzip.c and archival/gzip.c have common constant static arrays and -code for initializing the CRC array. Both use CRC-32 and could use -common code for CRC calculation. Within archival/gzip.c, the CRC -array should be malloc-ed as it is in libbb/unzip.c . +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.)