[BusyBox] Busybox 1.1.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Fri Jul 1 01:45:55 UTC 2005


Okay, my new laptop seems mostly functional now, and I'm catching up on the 
past couple weeks' accumulated email.  (My reactions to kbuntu are mixed, but 
at least it's not Fedora.)

In addition to catching up on the gazillions of back patches that I have in my 
"review this and check it in" folder, I've also got an idea I want to bounce 
off of Erik:

1) I'd like to get a busybox 1.0.1 release out in the next month or two.
2) I'd like to fork a busybox 1.1 tree and start attacking the TODO list.

Opening busybox 1.1 gives us the ability to say "no" to new features in 
busybox 1.0 without actually rejecting them.  That can become a 
bug-fixes-only branch, with new features added to 1.1.  We need more regular 
releases of 1.0.  It's been over seven months since 1.0.

Furthermore, I'd suggest moving some of the newer features (such as ipcs and 
mke2fs) to the 1.1 tree so they get a good shakedown and get their size 
reduced more before we send them out into the wild.  Adding lzma would 
definitely be 1.1 material.  (I'd also like to deprecate the devfs stuff; 
it's going away in the 2.6 kernel and anybody using 2.4 probably shouldn't be 
using the 1.1 branch.  But that's an argument for later.)

As for goals for the 1.1 branch: work through the current TODO list, do a 
cleaning pass over whatever apps we manage to look at (I lost my rewrite of 
init but I can always do it again), and do a SuSv3 audit.  (Not necessarily 
become SuSv3 _compliant_, but we should at least know where we are relative 
to that.  Of course having an SuSv3 complaince config option would be nice.)  
Any big companies that wanted to sponsor this work would, of course, be 
welcome, but let's face it: how realistic is that?  (I intend to do it 
anyway, the question is how long it'll take.)

And yes, I'll go through the darn web-based bug tracker system.  My new laptop 
has 512 megs of ram, it doesn't swap itself to death for 5 minutes at a time.  
The web based system isn't quite as much of a pain as it used to be...

But first, I need to catch up with the list and my big to-merge heap.

So, Erik: opinions?

Rob



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