[Toybox] Getting Toybox into Android before the NetBSD userland wins out

[David Seikel]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 22:11:41 +0000 (UTC) Jason Spiro
<jasonspiro4+gmane at gmail.com> wrote:

> Over time, Android has gradually been copying more and more of the
> NetBSD source code into the Git 
> repository which holds their "toolbox" command.[*]
> 
> ^  [*].  See, for example, this change:
>          
> <http://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/
> fd4c6b0a3a25921a9fe24691a695d715aecb6afe>
> 
> I still prefer Toybox.  For one thing, the "-h" help built into
> various Toybox commands tends to be far 
> better.  (Why is the "-h" help built into various NetBSD commands so
> skimpy? I guess the developers 
> assume that all users have a manpage viewer installed.  Well, Android 
> includes no such viewer.)
> 
> I think that it would be unwise to wait until Toybox hits 1.0 before
> trying to get Toybox into Android.  
> The longer the project waits, the better the NetBSD userland will be 
> integrated into Android and the more 
> accustomed the Android team will become to that userland's quirks.
> 
> I humbly suggest that perhaps the best thing to do would be to visit
> the Android mailing list today, and 
> to float the idea of getting _some_ parts of Toybox into Android.
> Perhaps start by suggesting that 
> Toybox could provide some useful things that Android doesn't yet
> include: for example, dos2unix, 
> unix2dos, nice, renice, sort, uniq, usleep, tac, tee, yes, and acpi.
> 
> Once Toybox gets into Android, it might then be possible to convince
> the Android maintainers to provide 
> symlinks from /system/bin to _all_ of the reasonably-finished parts
> of Toybox.
> 
> What do you think of my idea?
> 
> Kind regards,

This reminds me that I should pull my finger out and put my toybox
installer on Play.

Your idea requires evangelizing, something I am terrible at.  So great
idea, I just can't help with it.  Good luck.

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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