[Toybox] New toy: login

[Rob Landley]

On 04/28/2012 05:27 PM, David Seikel wrote:
> I wrote a sysv init (and friends) long ago that might fit into toybox.
> I might blow the dust off it and see what happens.  It was a clean room
> version aiming to be LSB compliant, and working from the LSB specs.

Digging up a copy of this thing turns out to be nontrivial, the original
linuxbase.org page (still the second google hit, after wikipedia) got
Borged by the Linux Foundation and now redirects to a page with NO
DOWNLOAD LINKS. Luckily the sixth google hit is some third party cache
of the actual PDF of section 1, which seems to be the useful bit. (No, I
don't care about x86 vs x86-64 here.)

It's 649 pages long. Why is it 649 pages long?  And... Oh wow:

  Section 18.1: Mandatory Optional Behaviors.

This entire file is a joke, right?

Ok, page 500 is the start of a 2 page table listing commands... ah I
see, all the [1] ones are posix and the [2] ones are locally tainted...

Ah,  there's a web version:

http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/cmdbehav.html

  ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep
  fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
  gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls
  lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd
  patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync
  tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat

So some of that is new commands (for a definition of "new" that dates
back to the 1970's in the case of stuff like mount), and a bunch of it's
in posix.  So what does a delta against a posix command look like? Quick
glance at xargs: it's yanking three command line arguments posix
supports and saying using them is undefined behavior. I.E. this is an
accomodation for a defect in some gnu/dammit package.

Let's look at "more"... yup, again: util-linux hasn't caught up with
current POSIX so we COME OUT WITH A STANDARD SAYING EXPLICITLY WHERE
IT'S OK TO CONFORM TO THE OLDER BEHAVIOR.  Why not just say it's ok to
conform to the older behavior? What is WRONG with these people?

This entire standard is a series of workarounds. What a pile of...

And I gotta triage this.  (ar and m4 are build tools, lpr isn't really
our problem because these days printers need drivers and that means some
crawling horror like cups...)

Ok, todo item.  Thanks for the heads up.

Rob
-- 
GNU/Linux isn't: Linux=GPLv2, GNU=GPLv3+, they can't share code.
Either it's "mere aggregation", or a license violation.  Pick one.

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