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>:
+ 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. I'm writing a new shell (bbsh) to unify the various
+ shells and configurably add the minimal set of bash features people
+ actually use. The hardest part is it has to configure down as small as
+ lash while providing lash's features. The rest is easy in comparison.
+ bzip2
+ Compression-side support.
+ init
+ General cleanup.
+ 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
+ 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.
+
+
+Bernhard Fischer <rep.nop@anon.at>:
+ Makefile stuff:
+ make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm
+
+As yet unclaimed:
-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.
----
-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
- 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
(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
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
- 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
- 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.
projects / oweals / busybox.git / commitdiff