Help - busybox

[Mike Frysinger]

On Thursday 07 May 2009 09:56:27 David Krakov wrote:
> I'm taking an university course on 'open source development', with a
> requirement to choose an open source project, and help.
> Busybox seems nice enough, so I figured, why not.

forced communism !

> I was searching for stuff to do in the TODO file (is it up to date? no
> commit for two months), but it seems there are either very small stuff
> or very big stuff involving rewriting core applets, which may not fit
> in the time I have for this course assignment. How up to date is it?
>
> Stuff I can do:
>  * Porting of new applet - some networking applets I'll be happy
> to see in busybox: tc, brctl, some options of ip - I'll do that if
> there are no better suggestions.

tc/brctl seem like fairly large things to try and tackle in your timeframe, 
and i think people have posted attempts in the past.  adding additional 
options to ip though seems reasonable.

>  * Fixing/changing a specific applet with a specific needed change (do
> some of the small stuff in the TODO file).

should also be fairly straightforward.

>  * Add very needed tests for some applet.

tests are always needed, but hard to get right ...

> Any suggestions / guidelines-for-the-new-clueless-noob / pending issues to
> fix? I have access to x86 and arm boards, fair embedded experience, and a
> few weeks to spare.

*my* suggestion (i.e. take it how you like) is to locate applets in busybox 
that implement POSIX utilities and audit them for POSIX conformance.  then 
audit them for GNU conformance.  then document all your findings in a new 
doc/conformance.txt file while perhaps implementing some of the missing 
features.  people ask for this stuff semi-regularly, but the actual process of 
doing a complete audit is boring and people generally only care about one or 
two applets / features.

you can find the latest POSIX documentation (1003.1-2008) here:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

and the complete list of all utilities that POSIX covers:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html

btw, there most likely will be utilities there that busybox has no applets for 
because said utility is fairly esoteric ... i wouldnt bother trying to 
implement them since (1) so far no one has even asked for it and (2) it is 
highly unlikely anyone will use/want it in the future.  the 'admin' tool is a 
good example of this :).
-mike
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