[Toybox] Hello, I would like to carve out a project

[Rob Landley]

On 05/23/2013 05:13:37 PM, Terrel Shumway wrote:
> I listened to Rob's "Why Toybox" talk and I understand the urgency.
> 
> My recent coding experience has been in Python, but I did some C a  
> long
> time ago. I would like to help.

Yay!

> Is there a important command that a semi-newbie could whip out in  
> ~40-80
> hours?  I am thinking of pgrep/pkill,  but I am willing to work on
> something else that may be a higher priority.
> 
> This would be part of my capstone project for B.S.

I'm unaware of anybody working on pkill.c, sounds good to me.

Something we really need is help with code cleanup. I'm doing a long  
series of posts explaining cleanup work I'm doing on other people's  
contributions:

uuencode:  
http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/landley.net/toys/posix/uuencode.c
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-April/000904.html
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-April/000903.html
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-April/000919.html

ifconfig: http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/907/toys/pending/ifconfig.c
843:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-April/000882.html
844:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-April/000881.html
852:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-April/000921.html
862:
863:
864:
866:
869:
870:
878:
879:
883:
898:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-May/000974.html
905:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-May/000992.html
906:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-May/000994.html
907:  
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-May/000995.html

(The point is to teach other people how to write a 500 line command in  
one or two files instead of a 1500 line one touching eight files.)

> -- Terrel
> 
> BTW: Hardware wise, I have a Nook simple touch and a Raspberry Pi  
> that I
> would love to put to use.

Cool.

I have a project called Aboriginal Linux  
(http://landley.net/aboriginal) that creates system images for a bunch  
of different architectures, boots them under qemu, and natively build  
codes in the emulated system (which includes a native toolchain capable  
of building Linux From Scratch). It was the project that got me into  
busybox development, trimming a self-compiling system down to just 7  
packages (busybox, uClibc, linux, binutils, gcc, make, bash). I'm now  
gradually replacing busybox with toybox (as described in  
http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html), and need to swap uClibc out  
for musl as soon as I get time to rewrite ccwrap. (After finishing  
mount.c.)

Unfortunately, qemu 1.2 was the last good release, 1.3 and 1.4 have  
glitches in tcg, and when they finally fixed that in 1.5 (commit  
52ae646d4a3e) they screwed up the arm versatile board emulation's IRQ  
routing (in commit 66a96d7018b9). I need to poke 'em and maybe they can  
get a fix into 1.5.1 or something...

Anyway, that's http://landley.net/aboriginal if you're interested in  
testing on (emulated) ppc and sparc and such.

Rob