[BusyBox] Division of work.

Gennady Feldman gena01 at cachier.com
Tue Mar 6 19:12:09 UTC 2001


On Fri, 2 Mar 2001, Mark Whitley wrote:

> 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)
  Are we going to get rid of netkit-tiny CVS branch, mailing
list(s),etc..?

>  - Merge tinylogin into busybox. (I would like to see this happen, but opinion
>    is divided.)
>
	TinyLogin and netkit-tiny will need +s in order to operate
properly, which is another thing to consider. And from the previous
discussions it seems that this issue is still open.

>  - 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.
>
	I think that a lot of people on this list were for creating
separate branches and maybe even having certain people track those
branches and update CVS, review patches, etc..
>  - Turn utility.c into libbusybox.
	This is probably a good idea, but we might need 2 options: dynamic
and static linking. Esp. if we can link everything into 1 binary file
(login+busybox+netkit)

>  - No new configuration system. The preprocessor-based one works well enough
>    for all involved.
	I am currently working through the changes in configuration and
macros. (Feedback on new layout coming soon) I am also reviving my syslogd
Circular buffer patch for the "new" version of busybox. Anybody willing to
test it? The only thing I am not sure is that I use shared memory in my
code to contain/hold the buffer which might not be portable, but then again
you can turn that feature off.

>  - 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.
>
	Actually one nice thing we could try to do is to use a syntax
similar to javadoc. I remember that I was really impressed when I was
using Java for some of my work. Essentially programmers need to comment
their code and with a bit of "magic tokens" we can extract and format
those comments into HTML documentation or some other format.

>  - 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.
>
	Actually I propose to have people maintain branches to help out
"applet writers" with proof-checking the code and checking for style-rules
and such things. Btw, nice work on style-guide (maybe we should post it on
the website? together w/ other text files?)

>  - 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.
>
	When is 0.50 scheduled for release?

G.F.






More information about the busybox mailing list