why are init's arguments wiped ?

[Mike Frysinger]

On 31 Jan 2016 22:56, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 01, 2016 at 12:21:00AM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On 29 Jan 2016 21:10, Laurent Bercot wrote:
> > > On 29/01/2016 17:50, Nicolas CARRIER wrote:
> > > > I quite agree with dietmar, concerning uglyness...
> > > 
> > >   <shrug> That doesn't change the fact that it's the behaviour of every
> > > init binary since 1970 and that you should come with a better reason if
> > > you want to change it, especially since it's so easy to accomplish what
> > > you want with a little workaround.
> > 
> > not really.  his proposal makes busybox smaller.  the only reason given
> > for making busybox larger is "it makes `ps` 'nicer'".  if there's no real
> > technical reason for it and nothing is impacted, then shrinking busybox
> > is a no brainer.  at the very least, it makes sense to make it a config
> > option that defaults to off.
> > 
> > this was first changed here, but not really documented:
> > https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=e132f4b09e5c9aedaef97f65279e8702633fd425
> 
> Looking near that commit, I see that it moved the code in question, but
> it seems the origin was instead this commit:
> 
> commit 3163821967821518cfa4c4315f775ec5301bb023
> Author: Erik Andersen <andersen at codepoet.org>
> Date:   Sat Jan 15 22:28:50 2000 +0000

i don't think so.  that commit sets argv[0] to "init", but it doesn't
mess with the other argv elements.  the one i pointed out sets argv[1]
to NULL.  there is a later commit which changes it to what we see now:
clearing every valid argv.

not that it matters terribly much as none of the commits provide any
real background beyond the details we have already -- make `ps` nice
and "compatibility" with other inits (not that we know of any real
need for this).
-mike
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