thoughts on reorganizing BB menuconfig structure?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Fri Mar 24 00:35:19 UTC 2006


On Thursday 23 March 2006 2:39 pm, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   as a followup to my earlier whine about the somewhat non-informative
> "Debian Utilities" BB config menu entry, i'd still like to see some
> shuffling around of the config entries to have them make more logical
> sense.

Sounds long overdue.

>   in some cases, a top-level entry is already perfect -- say "Module
> Utilities."  no problem there.  but from there, things get sort of
> erratic.
>
>   the biggest problem, i think, is the arbitrary grouping of so many
> entries under "Coreutils", "Linux System Utilities" and "Miscellaneous
> Utilities."  some thoughts (some large, some small):
>
> * drop "Debian Utilities" entirely and spread those entries elsewhere

Works for me.

> * move "dmesg" to "Logging Utilities"?

Sure.

> * i don't consider "ar" to be an "Archival Utility".  i see it more as
> a Development utility.  how many people are actually using "ar" for
> archiving?

Nobody.  But we don't currently have a lot of development utilities.

I'm slowly reading through the mondo make manual, and as usual my reaction to 
reading a specification is to imagine how I'd implement it.  But for right 
now, I'm not seeing a big demand for this nor have I got the spare time. :)

By the way, "strings" is part of binutils, and when I make a development 
system with busybox I have to zap the binutils version of strings to use the 
busybox one.  Just FYI.

> * how about an entire section devoted to "Shell Applets"?  by that,
> i mean applets normally used, say, for shell programming:
>
>   true, false, echo, expr, getopt, dirname, basename, length, env,
>   printenv, printf, and lots more.

Sounds reasonable.  (I'm working on replacing the four current busybox shells 
with one scalable bbsh, and when I'm done it won't need its own menu...)

>   that would cut down the size of "Coreutils" considerably.
>
> * how about a section on "Servers"?  right now, it would be rather
> short (telnetd, udhcpd) but who knows what else might show up there?

dnsd.  (Which I still need to get around to testing...)

> * several applets should be moved to "Process Utilities", such as
> "nice", "watch", etc.  don't those qualify as "process" utilities?

Works for me.

>   anyway, i can see lots of other adjustments but i'll just throw this
> out for now.

Gimme a patch, not a discussion. :)

> rday

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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