Why was netcat reverted?

[Rob Landley]

So I'm trying to phase out toybox in aboriginal Linux and push everything I 
need upstream into busybox, and I'm down to two commands I still need from 
toybox: my patch implementation, and my netcat implementation.

I was looking at porting my toybox implementation of netcat over to busybox, 
but the complication is that the busybox netcat implementation used to do 
everything I need, back in the 1.9 release.  Then the one that was in there 
got blown away and replaced with an external netcat implementation for no 
apparent reason.

I did a make baseline/bloatcheck between 29fe7265b8c1917eb^1 and 
29fe7265b8c1917eb, and found that the results differ by 11 bytes.  Except the 
"new" one doesn't have -f (allowing it to scriptably attach to char devices 
such as serial consoles), and it doesn't have server mode (allowing it to work 
as a poor man's inetd and wrap busybox's ftpd).

So, loss of significant functionality, size change 11 bytes.

Why did this happen, and is there any significant reason I can't just revert it 
to the old version that _did_ do these things, and/or bring in the toybox 
version that does them?

Rob
-- 
GPLv3: as worthy a successor as The Phantom Meanace, as timely as Duke Nukem 
Forever, and as welcome as New Coke.