[Aboriginal] Busybox applets not yet implemented

[idunham at lavabit.com]

Landley wrote:
> I've thought of installing busybox in one directory and toybox in
> another and having the $PATH fall back between them, but busybox is
> going away. Toybox is replacing busybox. So the extra plumbing would
> just be transitional.
>
> build/host/busybox currently says:
>
> Currently defined functions:
> 	[, [[, ash, awk, bunzip2, bzcat, bzip2, cpio, dd, diff, egrep,
> expr,
> 	fgrep, find, ftpd, ftpget, ftpput, grep, gunzip, gzip,
> ifconfig, init,
> 	install, less, lspci, man, mount, mv, pgrep, ping, pkill, ps,
> route,
> 	sed, sh, split, stat, tar, test, tr, umount, unxz, vi, wget,
> xzcat,
> 	zcat
>
> vi and less need the same line editing code as the shell command
> history, otherwise reasonably straightforward.
>
> grep/egrep/fgrep are mostly just regex code wrappers, I should do that.

> mount/umount I started and got interrupted, need to get back to it.

My own experiments with booting a Debian system with a custom shell init
indicate that only a few things are needed to boot up a system properly:
-a sh: pd/mksh is enough for now.
-mount: the next most important part.

-mdev: fixing /dev does demand some subdirs, and hotplug will require
handling env variables (which busybox has support for);
not highest priority, though.
-grep, modprobe, cut: I autoload modules by
grep -h MODALIAS /sys/bus/*/devices/*/uevent 2>/dev/null |cut -d = -f 2
|xargs modprobe -abq

modprobe needs the following for this use case:
Support aliases. May require depmod.
-a: insert all modules in a list at once
-b: blacklist needs to work!
-q: Hot/coldplug shouldn't spit out a mile of errors.

> cpio and tar are fairly straightforward, on my todo list.

Of the two, tar may be more important for building, but cpio is what
matters for replacing klibc-utils.

> man is a design issue: not sure what it _should_ do. A trivial zcat of
> preformatted text is trivial, it should integrate with the "help"
> command somehow. (help documents shell builtins, man documents stuff
> installed in $PATH, for toybox both are builtin but man should also
> check $PATH for external commands. But _not_ the horrible troff crap.)

Standard man often caches formatted troff as text, which would be a good
place to start.

> ash and sh are a biggish deal, I've got a lot of research for that but
> need a couple months to do it right. expr is basically the $((blah))
> shell builtin. [, [[, and test are all the same command, which I've
> started a local implementation of.

There's plenty of shells around, so I'm not too concerned about it.

Of course, this is all my own opinion, looking at it from the boot
perspective.