Sime makelike wrapper scripts support

[Laurent Bercot]

>This is not a general condemnation on implementing a busybox binary that
>you've just arbitrarily decided "shall not be accepted" simply by fiat,
>without provided rationale and without being the project maintainer who
>actually has the right to arbitrarily decide things.

But I did provide a rationale: it's creeping featuritis, plain and
simple. If you found my posts offensive, be assured that it's nothing
compared to how offensive the idea is to me that "mim" and "make"
should be part of busybox.

No, I'm not the maintainer, thank God. (If I was, I would be forced to
be polite and oppose reasonable arguments to unreasonable proposals,
and doing this with my own projects without ever losing my temper is
enough of a pain in the ass as is.)

But I've been a busybox user for long enough, and in enough varied
environments, that I happen to have a rather good idea of what would
probably be a good fit for busybox and what would not. Sometimes it's
not clear-cut, sometimes there are arguments for and against, and it
becomes a matter of opinion, and ultimately the maintainer's opinion
prevails.

"mim" and "make" are not even close. For very different reasons, left
as an exercise to the reader for now because I'd like to have dinner
soon.

So, yeah, that's just my not-humble-at-all opinion, and I'm a peasant,
but a peasant who likes his tools and would love to keep them free of
useless add-ons. And, unfortunately, who's not always successful at
preventing them.


>And after all, why include patch and diff applets, then reject make on
>sheer principled outrage?

  Now *that* is a good question, and a discussion worth having. My answer
to it is twofold:

  - If it had been my decision, patch and diff wouldn't have made it
into busybox. That's as simple as that. I've had disagreements with
Denys before, and my position is that busybox *already* has too much
stuff in it. Other users like it the way it is, because to them busybox
is a one-stop shop; but my opinion is that offloading integration work
to busybox is doing a disservice to the project.

  - The very fact that you are using the existence of the patch and diff
applets as an argument in favor of the inclusion of make is *exactly*
why creeping featuritis is so insidious and terrible. You're right,
since we have patch and diff, why not add make? And, since we started
so well on the path of development tools, why not add binutils, and a
C compiler, and autotools, and git? Slippery slope is very, very
slippery.

  We have a duty to recognize creeping featuritis for what it is when it
happens, and I'm saying - loudly and unpleasantly because I don't like
to be the one having to spend time on this - that this thread is pure
unadulterated unchecked creeping featuritis, and every time a similar
proposal is not met with a hard NO, the value of the busybox project
decreases.

  Now, am I talking to software engineers, or do I really have to explain
*why* the value of the project decreases with every useless additional
applet, *even when* there is a configuration switch that can disable it
at build time?

--
  Laurent
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