[Toybox] [PATCHES] cleanup passes on cut.

[Rob Landley]

On 02/21/2017 04:30 PM, Daniel K. Levy wrote:
> I'm guessing there's quite a bit of good work sitting in your local
> changes that just needs time for *someone* to look at.

I agree I have a lot of half-finished todo items. :)

I'm not sure what process changes can do about "shortage of time due to
attack of life". (Said attack of life hit $DAYJOB harder than it hit me
personally, but I got the fallout.)

> I've got an idea. What if you committed your in-progress changes into a
> separate, "wip" or "in-progress" git branch? Warts and all, maybe with
> TODO comments for what needs to be fixed/continued/whatever.
...
> Maybe the simplest option is to have a toys/wip dir which is one
> logical step below pending.

That was the point of pending, but people started using stuff out of it
anyway.

(I've had to explain to 3 people so far at this conference that "toysh
is crap". It can't do pipes and redirect. It can't substitute
environment variables. It hasn't got for loops, if statements, or
functions yet. It is not yet a real shell. This came as a surprise to
each person. My estimate is about 4 months of fulltime work to turn it
_into_ a real shell, which is not the same as "it should be done 4
months from now"...)

> It could contain duplicates of existing
> toys, which might be completely broken while they're in progress,

Duplicate commands are a build break at the moment. (It's a flat
namespace when you type "toybox", the subdirectories are more or less
cosmetic.)

> but get promoted to pending or regular dirs once completed. I'd just worry
> that someone might try to actually use the wip toys if they were in the
> master branch, especially if they were new.

That's what happened with toys/pending, yes.

> Just, something to allow contributors to prevent duplicating or
> invalidating your work.

Eh, it's my fault for not moving fast enough. I created pending so I'd
be less of a bottleneck. I wrote cleanup.html in hopes I'd be less of a
bottleneck for cleanup too. Can't complain if people take me up on it. :)

> Anyway, something to think about if you have a few moments of spare
> time.

Said few moments of spare time are currently trying to finish getconf.
(The adelie linux guys gave me permission to use their version under the
toybox license. I mostly just copied their symbol name list, but it was
still really cool and I need to remember to acknowledge them with a link
to their version in the commit message.)

Rob