[BusyBox] Division of work.

[Mark Whitley]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 09:53:50AM -0500, Richard June wrote:
> Has the decision finally been made as to how the division of work is 
> going to be?

Short answer: no, we nave not made a final decision as to how we will
re-organize things, but read on.

> will there be one big project w/ lots of modules(busybox, 
> tinylogin, etc) or will there continue to be a bunch of small projects.
> in the modules, will people get assigned applets or is it going to 
> continue to be as it is?

Lemme tell ya what Erik and I have discussed, mingled with what ideas from
folks on the mailing list, and further mingled with stuff I would like to see:

 - Leave networking apps in busybox (i.e. no netkit-tiny as we had previously
   announced)

 - Merge tinylogin into busybox. (I would like to see this happen, but opinion
   is divided.)

 - Possibly create subdirectories for logical groups (i.e. fileutils,
   shellutils, netutils, loginutils, etc.). Undecided as to which
   subdirectories will be made, or whether we will do it at all.

 - Turn utility.c into libbusybox.

 - No new configuration system. The preprocessor-based one works well enough
   for all involved.

 - Auto-generate SGML documentation from usage.h. This means the examples in
   the current docs will be grafted into usage.h. (Don't worry, you'll still
   be able to leave them out of the binary.) I'll be working on this as I find
   time. The autodocifier.pl script in docs/ and written by John Beppu is a
   great help for getting us there. 

 - Applets will not be assigned. (This turned out to be an unpopular idea.)
   Instead, people can voluntarily speak up if they want maintain a particular
   applet. A person who does the initial write / rewrite of an applet gets
   first dibs on being the maintainer. If an applet is unowned but somebody
   has made numerous edits to it and is familiar with the codebase, they're
   probably best qualified to be the maintainer and are encouraged to speak up
   if they want to be maintainer.

 - We're not going to do any of this until 0.50 is out the door. Which reminds
   me: we'd like to get 0.50 out the door pretty soon. I've been trying to
   triage the bug list to help make this happen. If there are any bugs that
   anyone would like to see fixed before 0.50, please speak up now.


Mark Whitley
markw at lineo.com