thoughts on reorganizing BB menuconfig structure?

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 25 March 2006 6:39 am, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Mar 2006, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Friday 24 March 2006 4:34 am, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > > > On Thursday 23 March 2006 14:39, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > > >   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):
> > > >
> > > > the groupings arent arbitrary, they correspond to the actual
> > > > upstream packages
> > >
> > > ok, i see.  now it becomes clearer.
> >
> > I noted in the readme that we replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs,
> > file, findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools,
> > procps, sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim.
> > (I note that this list should have gzip and patch added to it.)
> >
> > We don't have directories for all of those packages.
>
> ok, so what does all this mean?  that there *is* some value in
> cleaning up the BB config menus?  that there *isn't*?  i'm confused.

There's certainly some value in cleanup.  What cleanup, I'm keeping an open 
mind.

This is a user interface issue.  The existing packages are somewhat arbitrary, 
but familiar to a lot of people.  People want to use busybox to make Linux 
systems, and some of them learned via Linux from Scratch or some such, and 
are thinking in terms of what existing packages busybox is replacing.  And 
some people are thinking in terms of functionality, or just looking at a 
preinstalled system and trying to cherry-pick applets they need.

There are sort of three desirable groupings: 1) Show me all applets sorted by 
package (with the remainder in a "busybox" package"), 2) Show all applets 
sorted by functionality, 3) show all applets in alphabetical order.

With the current menu system, it's hard to do more than one of these.

> rday

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.