[Toybox] [PATCH] Implement ps -O.

[Rob Landley]

On 01/24/2016 10:06 PM, dmccunney wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 10:41 PM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>> I'm hoping that in future Android grows a userbase plugging their phone
>> into a USB hub with hdmi adapter, mouse, and keyboard (or chromecasting
>> to their TV with bluetooth keyboard and mouse) that can actually pop up
>> a terminal window. I'd like android devices to grow into the workstation
>> space and organically displace PC hardware. Your suggested change works
>> against that goal, when you _do_ have a terminal size, it's good to use
>> it...
> 
> There are attempts to create X86 ports of Android that *can* be used
> that way.  They are all alpha at this point.

I'm aware of them. I'm also aware of people trying to use telco android
as a desktop, ala https://lwn.net/Articles/668822/ but I'm not focused
on that level.

I'm trying to get AOSP to build on vanilla out of the box android.
Beyond toybox, we need llvm or similar, and we need "make" and "git"
implementations that aren't GPL, and probably m4...

Working on it. I've done some research on those last 3 and am prepared
to implement them myself if nobody else has before I get there.

> One of the things I've been watching for a while is convergence, and
> the idea that you'll run a flavor of the *same* OS on any device you
> may have.  Ironically, Windows seems closest, with Windows on the
> server, desktop,  laptop, notebook, tablet, and phone.  OS/X and iOS
> are increasingly converging, and seeing OS/X subsumed into iOS and iOS
> running on everything Apple makes would not be a surprise.
> 
> Linux is the odd man out, given that the Linux kernel itself runs on
> almost everything, but there are more different and largely
> incompatible distros than I can keep track of.  Android being the
> one-size-fits-all Linux distro that unifies the Linux space seems to
> be the best bet for convergence there.

Linux on the desktop failed, getting vendors to preinstall it didn't
happen and getting users to reimage their machines never cracked 2%
market share.

But a billion Android phones _exist_, and get gradually more powerful
with time.

> I have a good terminal app on my Android tablet (Jack Palevich's
> Terminal Emulator),

There's apparently one in the base AOSP build, which you can install
through the app store ("Terminal") but isn't installed by default for
reasons I don't understand at all.

> and I look forward to a  version of Toybox than
> can make Busybox go away.

For Aboriginal Linux's self-hosting and linux from scratch bootstrapping
build, I still need:

  awk bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gzip less ping
  route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat

There's a bunch more things in defconfig, but that's what I need for the
self-hosting part. (And the ftp stuff could be replaced by functioning
network mounts so maybe v9d or smbd instead...)

> I regularly use an external keyboard, and
> can use a mouse if I plug in a hub.
> 
> Given the steadily increasing power and decreasing size of components,
> I don't expect it to be long before your phone *is* your computing
> device, that you carry around as a phone, and plug into a docking
> station with KB, mouse, monitor, NAS and the like and *poof!*, it's
> your workstation.

The economies of scale tilt that way. A billion phones shipping
annually, an installed base expected to stabilize around 6 billion,
that's going to erode the PC niche the way the PC eroded minicomputers
and mainframes.

The question is what the resulting systems will be like. That's still up
in the air. (Apple's read-only ipad future would not be fun.)

Rob

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