Fwd: Re: [klibc] klibc and what's the next step?

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 11:17:41PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > > i would have thought that ash and dash were pretty much on par, since
>  > > one is derived from the other, and has been synced fairly regularly,
>  > > until recently, anyway.
>  > 
>  > Our ash is 13,000 lines long.  The smallest it can compile down to (with all 
>  > features disabled so it's basically unusable and "optimize for size instead 
>  > of speed" enabled which is a backwards option by the way) is 48k, which is 
>  > _still_ one of the largest applets in the tree (and about 1/20 of the total 
>  > size of "make defconfig"; enable all the features of ash and it bloats 120k 
>  > which is well over 10% a defconfig busybox).  2000 lines into ash.c it's 
>  > still primarily declaring global variables and function prototypes.  It's 
>  > full of brain damage like goodname() and exerror().  It's also full of 
>  > #ifdefs, everywhere.
>  > 
>  > It's _crap_.
> 
> but which bugs, specifically, are you referring to?  there are certainly
> bugs in ash, but in terms of usefulness in day to day scripting, none

I don't see where Rob said it's buggy... Just that the code is
disgusting. This could probably be remedied if anyone cared to do so,
but I suspect he would rather it _not_ be cleaned up so that he has
more of an incentive to write bbsh sooner rather than later.

> of the other busybox shells even come close, and if any other
> non-busybox shell came close in terms of quality per byte, busybox
> would probably already have switched to it.  

That's an understatement! Searching for a[n interactive] shell, BB ash
was the only viable option I could find. Bash is hopelessly
nonportable and bloated, while BB ash is the same size as glibc
"hello, world"...

> i know you have plans for bbsh, but i suspect it will be some
> time before its quality is (or, at least, is perceived to be) as
> high as that of ash.  so we've got to continue maintaining what
> we've got in the meantime.

I don't think perceived quality is an issue; when Rob gets it working
I'll be happy to use it. However I also would like to see ash
maintained (bugfixes, usability issues, etc.) in the mean time until
bbsh is written since I too think we'll have to wait a while.

Rich