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Busybox TODO
Stuff that needs to be done
find
doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff.
----
sh
The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different
shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't
work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not
being reentrant. Unifying the various shells and figuring out a configurable
way of adding the minimal set of bash features a given script uses is a big
job, but it would be a big improvement.
Note: Rob Landley (rob@landley.net) is working on this one, but very slowly...
---
diff
We should have a diff -u command. We have patch, we should have diff
(we only need to support unified diffs though).
---
patch
Should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
shouldn't take up too much space.
And while we're at it, a new patch filename quoting format is apparently
coming soon: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=112927316408690&w=2
---
man
It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or
anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly
compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that
calls cat/zcat/bzcat | less
---
bzip2
Compression-side support.
Architectural issues:
Do a SUSv3 audit
Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at
"http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and
figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that
we might actually care about.
Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
---
Internationalization
How much internationalization should we do?
The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this.
(Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?)
We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this
into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.
We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we can
cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to concern
ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a config
option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)
What level should things happen at? How much do we care about
internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
"unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
--unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font
loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)
---
Unify archivers
Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory
traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file",
"add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on.
This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar
write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs someday,
if it becomes relevant.
---
Text buffer support.
Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read
a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity
for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb...
---
Individual compilation of applets.
It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets,
for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu
utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big
executable.
Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb
could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less
got the code for (like zlib).
---
buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option
Busybox 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source code).
This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or equivalents.
It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
packages. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we can fix. (It
would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to replace bash and
diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
---
Memory Allocation
We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much.
We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls
into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER.
And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be
optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no
free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just
call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so
we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code.
---
Switch CONFIG_SYMBOLS to ENABLE_SYMBOLS
In busybox 1.0 and earlier, configuration was done by CONFIG_SYMBOLS
that were either defined or undefined to indicate whether the symbol was
selected in the .config file. They were used with #ifdefs, ala:
#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL
if (other_test) {
do_code();
}
#endif
In 1.1, we have new ENABLE_SYMBOLS which are always defined (as 0 or 1),
meaning you can still use them for preprocessor tests by replacing
"#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL" with "#if ENABLE_SYMBOL". But more importantly, we
can use them as a true or false test in normal C code:
if (ENABLE_SYMBOL && other_test) {
do_code();
}
(Optimizing away if() statements that resolve to a constant value
is known as "dead code elimination", an optimization so old and simple that
Turbo Pascal for DOS did it twenty years ago. Even modern mini-compilers
like the Tiny C Compiler (tcc) and the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC)
perform dead code elimination.)
Right now, busybox.h is #including both "config.h" (defining the
CONFIG_SYMBOLS) and "bb_config.h" (defining the ENABLE_SYMBOLS). At some
point in the future, it would be nice to wean ourselves off of the
CONFIG versions. (Among other things, some defective build environments
leak the Linux kernel's CONFIG_SYMBOLS into the system's standard #include
files. We've experienced collisions before.)
---
FEATURE_CLEAN_UP
This is more an unresolved issue than a to-do item. More thought is needed.
Normally we rely on exit() to free memory, close files, and unmap segments
for us. This makes most calls to free(), close(), and unmap() optional in
busybox applets that don't intend to run for very long, and optional stuff
can be omitted to save size.
The idea was raised that we could simulate fork/exit with setjmp/longjmp
for _really_ brainless embedded systems, or speed up the standalone shell
by not forking. Doing so would require a reliable FEATURE_CLEAN_UP.
Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it sounds.
The problem is, lots of things exit(), sometimes unexpectedly (xmalloc())
and sometimes reliably (bb_perror_msg_and_die() or show_usage()). This
jumps out of the normal flow control and bypasses any cleanup code we
put at the end of our applets.
It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and bb_xopen()
to add their entries to a linked list, which could be traversed and
freed/closed automatically. (This would need to be able to free just the
entries after a checkpoint to be usable for a forkless standalone shell.
You don't want to free the shell's own resources.)
Right now, FEATURE_CLEAN_UP is more or less a debugging aid, to make things
like valgrind happy. It's also documentation of _what_ we're trusting
exit() to clean up for us. But new infrastructure to auto-free stuff would
render the existing FEATURE_CLEAN_UP code redundant.
For right now, exit() handles it just fine.
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