[BusyBox] Improving Our Development Process

[David Douthitt]

On 23 Jan 2001, at 22:11, Mark Whitley wrote:

> Okay, gang, the time has come for an explanation about the whole netkit-tiny
> seperation plan:
> 
> There were a few reasons offered originally, like being able to
> suid netkit-tiny while not having to do the same for busybox, but
> Alex makes the very good point that we could simply build two
> executables from the same codebase. 

I've been wondering if building two sets of tinylogin would be 
advantageous - one suid and one not.  Seems like it would be more 
secure..... right?

> Alex (and others before him) futher make a good point that
> splitting up the apps would cause some redundancy in shared code
> (i.e. utility.c) which could lead to further maintenance burdens
> (somebody fixes a bug in busybox utility.c, but doesn't fix it in
> netkit-tiny utility.c, etc.). One could also argue that the applets
> should be kept together so people using it can decide for
> themselves what they want to compile into however many executables
> they want. 

Why not use a dynamic busybox library?  Convert this utility.c into 
busybox.lib.so ...and it wouldn't be far from there to go to 
busybox.lib.a ...

> In short, there is no technical reason why networking apps *can't*
> stay in busybox, and in fact there are some pretty good reasons for
> keeping all the applets in one codebase. 

What about the suid v. non-suid split?  Doesn't this enhance 
security?1

> I went and asked Erik about this (seeing as how he sits right next
> to me and isn't on the road this week), and he said that the
> biggest reason for splitting up busybox is to make life a little
> easier on him, cuz maintaining busybox is a big job, one that
> consumes a lot of his time (and he already has a full-time job). 

What about tinylogin?

> If anyone has any further ideas on how we can "spread the load" a
> little better, please propose it. If everyone else can help
> shoulder the burden just a little bit, Erik's shoulders will feel a
> lot lighter. :-) 

What if we went the library route?  A busybox library could even be 
split off from the applications.

-- 
David Douthitt
UNIX Systems Administrator
HP-UX, Linux, Unixware
n9ubh at callsign.net