I'd like to be a tester of busybox

Denis Vlasenko vda.linux at googlemail.com
Thu Oct 26 01:07:31 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 25 October 2006 03:33, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > If you are desktop guy - try to replace as much of desktop tools
>  > with relevant busybox applets as practical. Expect some breakage.
>  > For example: ls -i is not supported.
> 
> i really can't agree with this advice.  not if you're a serious
> developer, and your desktop is important to you.  the utilities
> in busybox just aren't ready for prime time, in my opinion.  (and

They will be never ready if we will not try.

> i'm speaking as someone who has shipped a bunch of product that
> uses it, has commit access, and who regularly contributes
> patches.)  error checking is missing, command-line options are
> missing, features are unimplemented, or mis-implemented, etc.
> 
> by all means, do busybox testing with the goal of turning busybox
> into a desktop replacement, but if you're just trying to "help
> out", that's a bigger risk than i'd be willing to take (denis'
> apparent success notwithstanding).
> 
> here's a minor example that we noticed today: "busybox tar -tv"
> doesn't show the major/minor numbers of device nodes from the
> archive.  this isn't something that would probably be a problem
> on an embedded system (and if it did, it would hopefully be
> caught in testing) but on a desktop, it could cause some user
> confusion or frustration.  there are lots more like this.

But Yuwen Dai is not a user. He wants to be a tester.
Testers, I suppose, understand that they are likely to
encounter breakage.
--
vda



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