[Toybox] The wikipedia[citation needed] page is behind the times again.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sat Nov 14 20:12:58 PST 2020


Somebody (not me) recently added a link to the busybox vs toybox talk to the
toybox wikipedia page, and they removed it again as irrelevant. (The
<strike>Aristocrats!</strike> Wikimedia Foundation!) Maybe the bot triggered
because it was a footnote that never got cited? (Just a guess.)

Obviously I can't edit the toybox page on there because I have firsthand
knowledge and am thus disqualified (and apparently even a video of me speaking
on the topic is out of bounds as not sufficiently hearsay/anecdotal), but the
first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox says 150 commands when
defconfig is over 200 now (and has been for a while) and that's just math.

Also, what does the word "some" in the first line contribute? Why not "Toybox is
a 0BSD licensed implementation of over 200 basic Unix command line utilities."
(They have a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause_license_(%22Zero_Clause_BSD%22)
so I don't see why they can't link to it? But then I dunno why wikipedia does
anything...)

"certain other operating systems"... certain? It's tested on linux, bsd, and
OSX, if it's been ported to anything else nobody's bothered to inform me yet.

I should do an analysis of what "Feature-wise, Toybox has not reached parity
with Busybox" actually _means_ someday. (Mostly that I need to promote toysh and
init? But I need to clear toys/pending and do a 1.0 release before I get to mock
them for that.)

The "history" section was probably not initially written by a native english
speaker? (ala "suggested to create" = suggested creating) "Rob Landley followed
the request and suggested instead to base this library on the dormant Toybox."
is subtly wrong in like 3 ways (the most obvious being it's not a library?) Tim
contacted me looking to hire a consultant to work on a project he was trying to
scrape up funding to create. He didn't request that I work on it for free, it
was a "Can I hire you to do this?" call and I went "Dude, I only stopped doing
that as a hobby because I ran out of viable goals to work towards. I have years
of code lying around I could trivially relicense if there's a USE for it, and if
you're saying there's demand and a userbase waiting for the result I'd be happy
to give it another go..." The "in android" part was previously too audacious to
seriously consider, but knowing that major phone _vendors_ wanted this to happen
meant I could maybe do an end-run around Google if they continued to be a
hermetically sealed ecosystem with no way to submit bug reports to gmail and so
on from outside the Googleplex.

(Yes, people offering me money for stuff and me either solving their problem on
the phone or winding up doing it for free so I can publish the result is a
chronic problem with me.)

But how do you explain all that to wikipedia? Maybe it could say something more
like "Rob Landley agreed with this goal but pursued it resuming work on toybox,
starting by relicensing his existing code from GPL to BSD." (I mean I literally
blogged about it at the time: https://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011 )

(Oh, and the busybox page has a _strangely_ worded toybox section, "re-licensed
under the BSD License after the project went dormant"? Kind of awkward backwards
phrasing, the relicensing was the first step in RESUMING work on it. But then
elsewhere on that same page it says "the sharp zaurus uses" and that product was
discontinued 13 years ago, so...)

Rob

P.S. Sometimes my english minor from college bobs to the surface. Their supposed
documentation is BADLY WORDED. https://xkcd.com/386/


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