[Aboriginal] trimconfig-busybox

[Rob Landley]

On 11/22/2011 11:16 PM, David Seikel wrote:
> Busybox used to use a trimconfig-busybox.  I take it that's been
> deprecated AND removed?

I pushed a bunch of patches upstream to busybox's kconfig stuff so that
defconfig switched on things I needed and switched off things that broke
on various targets.  This meant I could just use busybox's defconfig and
not have to manually configure it.

But I'm starting to rethink that decision.  A couple weeks back Tim Bird
(guy behind the Consumer Electronic Linux Forum) pointed out that a
bunch of companies were desperate for a replacement for Android's
toolbox, but the FSF's insane GPlv3 led to a "no GPL in userspace"
policy that tars GPLv2 with the same brush, so they couldn't just ship
busybox even if it wasn't turning into a giant hairball.

So I dug up my old toybox project, triaged the third party commits (and
got permission from all but one developer to switch the license, and
sadly had to remove his code because I can't FIND the guy), and
relicensed it under the simplest 2-clause BSD.

So I'm going to try to get Aboriginal building with just toybox.  Dunno
about a timeframe for this, and it'll be optional for a longish time,
but...  it's back in the cards. :)

> I'm trying to cut down on stuff I don't need, like NFS, RPC, and syslog
> for instance.  But cutting those out of uClibc means that busybox fails
> when trying to build commands I also don't need.
> 
> Looks like busybox is just doing defconfig now, I'll have to hack up
> it's build script.

I can put trimconfig back.

The thing is, I need to run more/record-commands.sh and
more/report-recorded-commands.sh to get the list of commands aboriginal
linux needs, but I _also_ need the list of commands needed by:

A) the boot script
B) the full Linux From Scratch build

I erred on the side of "throwing it all in" just to simplify native
build bootstrapping, and handed the "what belongs in defconfig"
decisions upstream to busybox.

Unfortunately, this causes various problems:

  http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-November/076916.html

And of course bloat continues ad nauseam:

  http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2011-November/076898.html

And I've _tried_ to go back to busybox development, but it's just no fun
to work on anymore:

  http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#08-06-2011

So yeah, toybox is back up.  http://landley.net/toybox

Rob

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