busybox Reboot

Ole-Egil Hvitmyren oehvitmyren at network-electronics.com
Tue Feb 28 10:44:37 UTC 2006


Rob Landley wrote:
> On Monday 27 February 2006 11:17 am, Ole-Egil Hvitmyren wrote:

> 
>>Things like syslog, su etc 
>>works completely different between the two revisions, which means it's
>>not a simple recompile for many of us.
> 
> 
> If you select the same applets, the new ones should work.  If they don't, we'd 
> really like to know.

Yeah, that's

Of course, it's been so long since I last tried a newer busybox on that
target, that I don't remember what the problem with upgrading was. :-)

It might actually have been when going from 0.60.5 to one of the
pre-1.0.0 snapshots where things just didn't make sense for me. I had
some problems with 1: syslog and 2: setuid. I might check up on that
later. Possibly the snapshot I tried was doing things differently than
the actual 1.0.0 release.

> 
>>Please, please, please remember this when people who use an older
>>release have a problem. They might not have the luxury of changing their
>>entire system just for a quick fix.
> 
> 
> The "make standalone" stuff in future versions should help this.  Replace just 
> the applet you're having problems with.

Yeah, that's going to be nice.
Of course, I don't actually HAVE a problem with 0.60.5, which is why I
didn't take the "hit" of upgrading it. It works.

> 
> Busybox 0.60 is two major releases back.  It's also before our 1.0 release, 
> which was a very important milestone for us.  It had _five_ bugfix release 
> versions before we moved on, and we're unaware of any problem in it like the 
> one the guy described.  Random reboots sound like a hardware issue.  He's 
> also not coming to us with a bug that's clearly ours asking for anything 
> specific, he's asking how to diagnose random reboots, which could be 
> anything.

I agree. But telling him that immediately would have seemed so much
nicer. Some times, pointing a stranger in the right direction costs
nothing more than pointing in the wrong direction. Spending time
upgrading his system (and it could be sitting at some customer location
he has little control over) to a more recent busybox if it's indeed a
hardware or kernel issue wouldn't have been a fun experience for anyone
involved.

I guess that's more or less my point here. The old immediate response of
"works for me" or "upgrade to get support" aren't ALWAYS good answers.
Because some times (and I see this a heck of a lot more often on some
support-lists I'm on than I do here, mind you), the one whom it works
for and has upgraded hasn't understood the question. Right answer to
wrong question doesn't help the user.

> 
> The only reason to stay with a version that old is for stability, and if it's 
> _not_ stable for you the reasoning becomes suspect.  That said, if you want 
> to ask actual technical questions here (that don't boil down to "please 
> diagnose my hardware problem for free"), some of us answer them.  Others 
> simply weren't _here_ five years ago...
> 
> And all that comes before the observation "if all else fails, you have the 
> complete source code".

Yep. "Use the source, Luke", I always say :-)

Anyway, I didn't want to start a flame war, I just wanted to comment
that for many people, there's a higher chance of them coming back for
newer releases and/or contributing back to the project if they feel they
are taken seriously. What I replied to didn't seem like taking the user
seriously. That is all, and enough gibberish from me, I guess. Sorry if
I came on too strong. I seem to get that a lot.

Ole-Egil



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