[BusyBox] udhp/dhcpd.c (lost/rejected) patch

[Paul Fox]

 > > i'm surprised at the pushback being given to this trivial feature --
 > 
 > I have the urge to frame that statement as the busybox mission statement in a 
 > nutshell.
 > 
 > 1) s/trivial/useless/

nope.

s/trivial/small/, or s/useless/useful/, take your pick.

 > 2) Gnu bloatware is as big as it is because of an endless accumulation of 

:-) bloatware???  i can give you much better examples of
bloatware in busybox:  ls coloring.  "cp -a".  "hdparm -t -T". 
"vi".  but adding '-f' to keep a daemon that insists on
backgrounding itself in the foreground hardly seems like
bloatware to me.  (yes, i know that some of those other examples
are configurable, but some are not.  this -f option could be
configurable too.  see, for example, devfsd.)

 > I think that if dhcp dies you have a bug that might be nice to know about 
 > rather than hide, so you can fix it.  Sure, all systems have bugs and if you 

and i think that that kind of attitude is just great, and i do
that, during development, and i do that, on my desktop systems,
but i _don't_ do that when i'm shipping a closed product to
thousands of customers who don't know or care what dhcp is or
does, but who simply need the box to perform a function for them
reliably.  downtime and upgrades are expensive.

 > want to spend the extra bytes to program defensively on deployed system go 
 > right ahead.  What do you need us for?  You have the source.

sorry.  i didn't realize this was "us" vs. "you".  i sort of
thought this was a bunch of people trying to make a great program
better, and more useful.  of course i have the source, and the
copy of busybox that goes into our products certainly isn't
cvs-pure.  i've contributed back patches (or offered to do so)
for any of our changes that seemed generally useful.  we also
have some local changes that i wouldn't bother "the community"
with.  we don't happen to need, or configure, the dhcp daemon, so
this one doesn't actually affect me, currently.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at brightstareng.com