[Toybox] making ./configure executable.

[enh]

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 8:45 AM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> On 02/05/2018 09:41 PM, Robert Thompson wrote:
>> Yeah, I ran into some similar issues years ago...  In my case,  I got
>> burned into learning not to assume that bash (or any other shell) is
>> correct, or even necessarily *self* consistent(even on linux), so I
>> tend to reflexively do differential checks. It's a very small amount
>> of effort in the normal case, but months of project time and a major
>> missed deadline tend to leave a bit of a scar :)
>>
>> there was a "posix, we swear" vendor /bin/sh, a classic /bin/bash, a
>> "new and sexy" /bin/bash, and the same version/same configuration
>> /bin/bash running on a different hardware/os...
>>
>> We wasted months assuming that the newer bash was most likely correct
>> (it was a heisenbug, both rare and inconsistent). In that case, turned
>> out that the posix sh was technically correct and consistent, and
>> *all* of the bashes exhibited *different* incompatible heisenbugs. And
>> they tended to show up only about a day into a massive
>> un-checkpointable processing run...
>
> The FSF is bad at writing software, yes. :)
>
> Part of my formative experience with Linux is that the FSF's software
> development efforts basically died for five years (1999-2004), so
> distros were using fixed stable versions of the userspace stuff. It was
> all basically "done". There were some ubiquitous local vendor patches
> (adding -j to tar and such in the 5 year gap between 1.13 and 1.14 being
> released, for example), and things that DID need to change like compiler
> development forked off as other projects (egcs, libc5), but there was a
> de-facto set of tools everybody agreed on, and that mostly included
> specific _versions_, and nobody had to care what the FSF thought about
> anything.
>
> Then the FSF noticed its ftp server had been broken into and was
> distributing malware, and they took all the source tarballs down and
> replaced them with a note asking if anybody had backup copies (of course
> the FSF itself didn't: it's the FSF). I noticed this had happened
> because I was doing Linux From Scratch, and three weeks later nobody'd
> cared enough to do anything about it so I poked slashdot
> (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/03/08/13/1530239/fsf-ftp-site-cracked-looking-for-md5-sums)
> and that whole debacle seems to have gotten people to notice the FSF was
> dead, but instead of _replacing_ them they volunteered at them and tried
> to work through their horrible crazy lens, and when that round of
> excitement subsided and the FSF went back to dying they tried suing
> people to reclaim attention
> (https://www.linux.com/news/gpl-requirement-could-have-chilling-effect-derivative-distros)
> and that "all we've got to squeeze money out of people is control of the
> license" nonsense snowballed into GPLv3.
>
> Not a net win, really.
>
> Anyway, even back at busybox I was mostly targeting equivalents of those
> 5-year "stable" versions from 1999, and only cherry-picking newer
> features when people asked for them or the kernel grew some new thing I
> wanted to take advantage of. These days my baseline is posix-2008 plus
> any Y2k-era Linux extensions that posix rejected because That's Not
> Solaris I Want Solaris La La La Solaris.
>
> So when I say "a proper bash replacement" I'm _mostly_ targeting bash
> 2.x with proper utf8 and the occasional new feature like ~= (regex
> matches) that are easy to do. Stuff like <(command) and file{1,2}.txt
> are over 20 years old.

<(command) isn't supported in mksh (used by Android) --- i think
that's the only thing missing in mksh that anyone's really noticed.

> I really don't care what the FSF's done since about 2005. As far as I'm
> concerned the Mepis thing I linked above was a career limiting move
> _before_ they split "the GPL" into incompatible versions so the Linux
> kernel and Samba can't share code even though they implement 2 ends of
> the same protocol and are both "GPL".
>
> (None of this excuses dash, though. :)
>
> Rob
>
> P.S. Yes, I did my own GPLv2 enforcement lawsuits circa 2006. That's
> another story...
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