[mkroot] mkroot went missing?

[Rob Landley]

On 03/25/2018 01:00 PM, Buck Evan wrote:> On Mar 25, 2018 9:16 AM, "Rob Landley"
<rob at landley.net
> <mailto:rob at landley.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On 03/24/2018 05:41 PM, Buck Evan wrote:
>     > I was going to dig into your project today, for my own edification, but I
>     got a
>     > 404. Is this a GitHub error, or are you renaming it, or something else?
>     >
>     > https://github.com/landley/mkroot <https://github.com/landley/mkroot>
> 
>     I ended it as a separate project because somebody who wasn't a lawyer tried to
>     be, and caused me legal problems I don't feel like dealing with.
> 
>     http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/mkroot-landley.net/2018-March/000093.html
>     <http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/mkroot-landley.net/2018-March/000093.html>
> 
>     The last version of the repository is available at:
> 
>     https://landley.net/mkroot.tar.gz <https://landley.net/mkroot.tar.gz>
> 
>     Rob
> 
> I saw that. I'm sorry you got fed up, and I hope that you feel differently
> when/if you recover from your cold :)
> 
> Do you mind if I show the list this conversation? They're asking too.

Sure, I'll cc them here.

I'm not trying to hide it, I'm just... tired. I just got
https://landley.net/notes.html caught up to the start of November, so who knows
when it'll see the light of day, but here's what I wrote in the local file for
Friday.

Rob


March 23

End of the "sprint" at work, meaning deadlines. I worked extra hours to
catch up from monday (contractor, paid for hours not accomplishments,
no vacation or sick days; can't complain because the hourly rate's
pretty good). So I've gotten very little open source stuff done
this week.

Friday: time to catch up on open source stuff! Starting with design work.

After the mess on the mkroot list, renaming the project "hermetic" would
be gratuitously picking a fight with a large corporation. But _not_
doing so would be backing down from my legal rights in the face of
shadows that _might_ turn into empty threats that _might_ turn into a
battle I could almost certainly win.

So I took the project down, because I don't like either option.
Now it doesn't matter what it's called, and armchair
lawyers can't empty chamberpots over it again.

I gave it a week to stew, and it turns out somebody did notice it
was down. I should send him a tarball. (As with busybox, the work I did
is out there open source, I'm just not continuing it as a separate project
that would need a name. Yes, there are still scars from SCO and bruce.
Work is assigning me to work on systemd configuration, my "this is not fun"
bandwidth is accounted for these days, thanks. My open source work is
either because I enjoy playing with it or because I'm trying to accomplish
something specific.)

There were two near-term use cases for mkroot: 1) better toybox test suite,
2) natively compiling stuff. Making the second work without plugging
the gaps with busybox is significantly more work than the first, but
the biggest single blocker to either is the lack fo toysh. Then again
I don't need every toysh corner case to get something that can run the
init script and toybox's scripts/test.sh and so on...

Ok, if I'm going to merge a subset of mkroot.sh into toybox as
scripts/mkroot.sh or similar, I should merge the modules/kernel
and modules/native scripts into the main file (those are the only part that
can't build natively under qemu with some control-image plumbing, even
the dynamic libraries can be added by rebuilding libc natively). I
no longer need it arbitrarily third-party extensible if it's not going to
be its own project.

I also need to rip out the busybox build. (I've kept an air gap between
toybox and
busybox ever since I stopped maintaining busybox, originally because
of Bruce contamination, then because license. I've contributed things
like toybox patch _to_ busybox, but nothing comes back the other way
except bug reports.)

Ripping busybox out of mkroot leaves a largeish hole, although all of
those commands are also in "make install_airlock" so it's part of
an existing todo list. That said, I can't bring networking up without
a "route" command (toybox's is in pending), and it really needs a command
shell to run (which can handle the init script). The rest is there
for native builds (wget and tar most obviously).

There are two near-term use cases: 1) better toybox test suite, 2) natively
compiling stuff. Making the second work without busybox is significantly
more work, but the biggest blocker to both is really the lack fo toysh.