new applet: devmem

Denys Vlasenko vda.linux at googlemail.com
Fri Oct 31 02:42:04 UTC 2008


On Thursday 30 October 2008 00:24, Rob Landley wrote:
> > Thanks for pointing out inconsistensies. I fixed a few.
> > Keep complaining please, this helps me to make it better.
> 
> I'm trying to understand the philosophy.
> 
> Three years ago we had a swiss cheese defconfig that was useful to nobody.  I 
> switched it to defconfig enabling every piece of functionality that was 
> expected to work out of the box, because that was a good starting point for 
> people who wanted to "start with everything" and pare it down to fit in the 
> space they had available.  (The other obvious starting point is allnoconfig, 
> starting with nothing and adding what they need.)
> 
> Making such a "maximum sane configuration" defconfig involved switching off 
> numerous debug options that "allyesconfig" enabled.  If "allyesconfig" left 
> these on it didn't build an actually usable configuration and thus wasn't a 
> good starting point for configuring your own custom configuration, it was 
> just there for testing purposes.  But anything that allyesconfig switched off 
> never got build tested and several of them didn't work.  It meant 
> allyesconfig was just there for testing purposes, so we needed defconfig as 
> the starting point for people to actually create their own "start with 
> everything and chop it down" configs.
> 
> If the "start with everything" config _doesn't_ include everything, then lots 
> of people never notice busybox even _has_ that applet unless somebody points 
> it out to them.  (That was another common complaint.)
> 
> But what defconfig _didn't_ do was try to figure out what commands people did 
> and didn't want to use.  If a command was useful to nobody then it shouldn't 
> be _in_ busybox.  If defconfig switches off a command that's useful to 
> somebody then it's not a good display of all busybox's functionality.
> 
> You're going back to the swiss cheese defconfig.  You're back to trying to 
> guess which commands "they" will want to use without knowing who "they" are, 
> and we know from experience that approach simply doesn't work.

I agree here.

I think that defconfig should have almost all applets on, except for really
old, useless applets (mt), or very crude ones (rpm, dpks) which are
most likely too limited or even buggy to replace standard
versions of these utilities.
--
vda



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