[Aboriginal] Thoughts on xargs and aboriginal

James McMechan james_mcmechan at hotmail.com
Thu Jan 5 14:28:18 PST 2012


I was reading your http://landley.net/notes.html and saw the weirdness
you were having with xargs' command line options for toybox
As you said the most commonly used option -0 is not part of the 
standard I think it is claimed as a GNU extension, it seems oddly useful 
to be GNU though.

It occurred to me that having a option like 
TOYBOX_LOG_WEIRD_POSIX_FLAGS
might be handy, rather than implementing the full standard on the first 
pass, make toybox's option parsing know about all the POSIX flags but 
just log them and their args (or the whole command line) to a file and 
report failure.
This might make "mind-bogglingly strange" a problem for a later
date and the log file could be used like record-commands.sh to find
what oddball option someone is actually using, who knows -I might not
turn up until someone is compiling the ancient CDE window manager
on a cell phone...

busybox would not be my first choice for an alternate implementation 
swapping uClibc for musl or glibc or one of the other C libraries might
be a better choice, several are available even if only for a architecture 
or two.  When testing the infrastructure for gcc-isms uClibc-isms ld-isms
etc. it would seem to be ok to test with only a architecture or two just to
ring out the gotchas and make sure things are mostly portable.

Of course the compiler is a problem gcc-isms have crept in especially in
the make dependency mess rather than using a correct make file to build the
global directed graph, we use a compiler option to partially compile every
file to produce a list of its includes to be used by make to determine if
the file needs to be compiled, but since the makefiles are called recursively
it may need another pass at the end to check if the other directories have made 
a update after this pass was checked. see aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf
This I seem to remember was the reason that tcc could not compile the kernel
last time I checked.  pcc, Clang/llvm, icc and tcc (after the dep phase) have 
been reported to compile the kernel, and so I would expect could compile 
aboriginal and could be used to ring out those gotchas.

Regarding the mini-busybox config I was using, I just wanted to be able to
recompile aboriginal under itself I have no direct need for LFS support, I can
after all compile busybox with defconfig under a running aboriginal setup.
Hey, vi and shell history are not something used in aboriginal's build process.

I note that linux 3.2 is now out I look forward to aboriginal 1.1.1

James McMechan

 		 	   		  


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