[Toybox] Out of tree build support

[Rob Landley]

On 12/19/2017 07:01 PM, Patrick Oppenlander wrote:
> On 20/12/17 09:24, Rob Landley wrote:
>> Really what I need to do is come up with a way to build toybox sed and
>> toysh...
> 
> How far are toybox sed & toysh from being usable to build toybox?

Sed's fine, I've built Linux From Scratch with it (albeit an older
version, 6.3 I think) and even done some patches for things like perl bugs:

  https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261

Which I found because I was building perl with it.

I haven't properly opened the toysh can of worms yet because toybox
isn't my dayjob and that one is going to need multiple consecutive
months to do right. Unfortunately most of the big remaining roadmap
items are still there because they require large consecutive chunks of
focus that the tiny little startup I've been working at since 2014 can't
afford to give me without going under.

Unfortunately I haven't had as much spare time the past year and a half
as I did before my startup ran out of money and went into survival mode.
(Which is as much exhausting as time consuming, I _do_ have spare time,
but I spend it sleeping. The real problem is I can never focus on
anything, I get high priority crisis crisis crisis world on fire
interruptions that derail what I'm working on and by the time I get back
it would be faster to start over. After about 30 of those I got a little
gun-shy about starting anything big. I've sat down and started over on
the dd cleanup _four_times_ now, and that's not even all _that_ big.)

That said, my 2013 talk on my grand plan for turning android into a
development environment is coming up on 5 years ago, and if I'm going to
make it happen I have to get unstuck pretty much now. (I'm looking at
selling my house. Last ELC Tim Bird asked what it would take to buy six
months of my time from my employer to do toysh, and I named him a
figure, and he went away and I never heard back. I think Sony had a
reorg or something. Sigh, I feel really bad about the rate of
development but I don't have as many gaps in my life to fit development
into as I used to. Downside of a dayjob at a startup that's _also_
trying to change the world...)

But hey, christmas break coming up. I'm hoping I can use it to make next
release less embarassingly "I got nothin'" than last release was. Maybe
I can get _one_ of my larger mostly finished things done. I called
getconf "mostly done" back in March, according to
http://landley.net/notes-2017.html#04-03-2017 anyway...

Speaking of which, I should catch up on my blog... there we go, another
month posted. (I didn't check twitter or my back email for things I
forgot to write about at the time, but eh. Edited to at least make the
tags match up. Next entry trails off half-finished and requires surgery,
of course...)

Rob

"I am sorry to have wearied you with so long a letter but I did not have
time to write you a short one" - Blaise Pascal