[Toybox] Toybox relaunch.

[Rob Landley]

I'm getting several questions about the toybox relaunch.  I guess I
haven't properly explained myself, so here's a cut and paste of an email
I sent somebody:

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The website is http://landley.net/toybox and the repository is
http://landley.net/hg/toybox .

When I handed off BusyBox maintainership in 2006 I started over from
scratch with a complete redesign, trying to figure out what the common
infrastructure _should_ look like.

  http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#28-09-2006

Busybox was never properly _designed_, it just sort of accumulated and
got retroactively cleaned up.  For example, adding a command in toybox
means adding a file to the "toys" directory: you don't have to touch any
other files, it detects what's there and uses it.  Adding a command to
busybox involved touching five different files.  The help infrastructure
was nuts, the option parsing infrastructure was nuts... lots of things
needed a rethink.

I spent a year and change working out the interesting design issues:

  http://landley.net/toybox/design.html
  http://landley.net/toybox/code.html

and then got busy with other things.  Around 2009 I mothballed the project:

  http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#18-06-2009
  http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#24-08-2009

Last week Tim Bird (of the Consumer Electronic Linux Forum) poked me and
mentioned:

1) how deeply pathetic Android's toolbox is (I was unaware of the sheer
scale of the sadness)

2) how various corporations were looking around for a BSD-licensed
alternative to busybox.  (He thought I was still a consultant and asked
if I was interested in being hired ot fix this. I reminded him about
toybox, and how I owned the copyright to that and could license it
however I wanted to...)

So over the weekend did a triage pass on my code to contact third party
contributors and rip out the code of people I didn't have current
contact info for, and relicensed it 2-clause BSD:

  http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/378

And now I'm going through my old todo lists and collating them...

Rob

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