PLATFORM_LINUX is evil

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Wed Feb 23 05:16:46 UTC 2011


So if you start with "allnoconfig" and look to see what applets you can
enable, things like "mount" don't exist for you unless you know to look
for them.  This adds a new layer of black magic and a-priori knowledge
required in order to build busybox.  That's not a good thing.

Busybox has always been a Linux program.  Pretending it's not at least
_primarily_ a Linux program is silly.  Anything that makes it harder to
use on Linux is _immensely_ counterproductive.  If you're trying to use
it on anything other than Linux, we have to assume you're an expert and
when it breaks you get to keep the pieces.

If you really felt the need to have such a symbol, it would have made
more sense for it to have no effect when off and remove things when it
was switched on, so it didn't break allnoconfig.  We've got plenty of
symbols such as CONFIG_SELINUX that render busybox unbuildable by normal
humans when enabled, which is why "allyesconfig" is useless and
defconfig needs special handling as a maximal sane configuration.  But I
personally don't see why you'd ever treat busybox on non-linux as
anything _other_ than something for experts.  (It's not like writing
toybox or Android's toolbox was all that _hard_.  If the macintosh
really needs its own busybox equvialent they can darn well write one.)

Rob


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