Suggested modification/extension of beep

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Fri Feb 19 14:12:24 UTC 2010


On Thursday 18 February 2010 03:48:19 Natanael Copa wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Harald Becker <ralda at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I  want to suggest an alternate and extended command syntax of the beep
> > applet.
>
> I think we want be compatible with "upstream" beep:

Why?  Breaking compatability with it would be bad, but adding optional 
extensions that don't mess anything up if you don't use them won't 
inconvenience anybody used to the other project's syntax.

When I upgraded busybox mount so you could go "mount file dir" and it would 
autodetect the need for "-o loop", I didn't go "oh no, util-linux doesn't do 
that, how DARE I make busybox more powerful than an existing package"...

If the upstream author says "that patch is outside the scope of what I want to 
maintain", that means we should limit ourselves?  I'm not seeing it...

> http://www.johnath.com/beep

That project hasn't been touched in eight years.  It has no mailing list.

Emailing a copy of the patch to the upstream author might be polite, but 
holding up busybox waiting for him to exhume beep development goes above and 
beyond the call of duty.

What might be interesting to look at is Eric Raymond's old "speaker" driver:

http://catb.org/~esr/software.html

>speaker-1.4      http://catb.org/~esr/speaker-1.4.tar.gz
>
>My speaker device driver for 386/486 boxes — permits you to play tunes on a
> PC-clone console speaker under UNIX. An older version was included with the
> NetHack distribution. This one has (untested) portability patches
> contributed by people who ported 1.3 to 386bsd and Linux. The speaker
> driver used in FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD is a descendant of this code.

I mention it because that has an existing string syntax for playing tunes, so 
that would provide an existing syntax for this sort of functionality.

That said, that package is DARN obscure.  (Ok, it's built into the BSD PC 
speaker drivers, but who actually knows or cares about that these days?)  I 
mention it as merely being "more relevant than beep", not _actually_ relevant.

I expect the userbase of either project could be counted on one hand, and the 
overlap with busybox's userbase is probably zero, so nobody's going to be 
inconvenienced.  There is no standard, just historical implementations that 
weren't widely used.

> I'd suggest you get your extensions in there too.

I disagree, but that's just my opinion.

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds


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