[PATCH] port some tools from http://smarden.org/runit/ to bbox

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sun Aug 20 22:27:14 UTC 2006


On Saturday 19 August 2006 2:53 pm, walter harms wrote:
> please note there is on other point.
> the user must be familiar with the tools and concepts. adding to much 
> 'new' stuff to bb will certainly alienate a lot of users since there are 
> not able to handle there system any more.
> 
> re,
>   wh

Well, if it was thrown in a different directory in menuconfig and the commonly 
used tools were still there that wouldn't be as much of a concern.

My problem is figuring out where to draw the lines.  I don't want busybox to 
turn into a gigantic hairball, and we already had our 1.0 release with fewer 
tools than we have right now.  After 1.0, the threshold for adding new apps 
has definitely gone up, but it's hard to come up with a black and white rule 
for what should and shouldn't be added.

However, getting 11 questionable applets at once definitely makes me 
go "Aaaaaah!  Hairball!" and want to run and hide.  I don't really care where 
apps come from, I lean towards writing busybox versions of things from the 
specs, and having the whole description be "go look at this other URL" when 
that URL is about an applet that apparently isn't one of the 11...  The 
names "chpst", "envuidgid", and "pgrphack" haven't really made me go "oh, I 
know what THAT does" without doing further research, and looking at the start 
of the patch the first usage entry for the first applet is:

+#define chpst_trivial_usage \
+       "[-vP012] [-u user[:group]] [-U user[:group]] [-e dir] " \
+       "[-/ root] [-n nice] [-l|-L lock] [-m n] [-d n] [-o n] " \
+       "[-p n] [-f n] [-c n] prog"

Which just _fills_ me with warm fuzzies, that does...

In this case there's no question that most users will be able to live without 
this, and its absence isn't even blocking for those who would want to use it, 
it's just a convenience.

All this hasn't totally ruled out merging it, but I'm not exactly jumping up 
and down with excitement, either...

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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