[Toybox] bionic?

[scsijon]

Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 11:55:01 -0800
> From: enh <enh at google.com>
> To: Rob Landley <rob at landley.net>
> Cc: toybox <toybox at lists.landley.net>
> Subject: Re: [Toybox] [PATCH] Make it easier to switch regex
> 	implementations.
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAJgzZopFOyG=nvBVwexX1xDSgA_cq_S=R0puYz7fUwAa1CGV_g at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 7:12 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 10/28/20 7:06 PM, enh via Toybox wrote:
>>> One reason to use toybox on the host is to get the same behavior across
>>> Android/Linux/macOS. Unfortunately (as we've seen from a few bugs) one
>>> area where that doesn't quite work is that toybox uses the libc regular
>>> expression implementation.
>> Which another reason the version of toybox you distribute should be statically
>> linked against bionic.
> aye, but "host bionic" is a longer project with no-one funded to work on it.

?Just out of curiousity, just what is 'bionic', and why is it so special 
that toybox should be forced to provide a specific version for it?


Especially, when as you say, it's not a funded project!


I've come across the name (mainly here) a few times now, but as as far 
as I know, I don't use it or need it, so i've ignored it until now, 
considering it to be one of the esoteric breeds.

>>> That's fine, and mostly what users want, but
>>> those folks trying to get the exact same behavior everywhere might want
>>> to switch in a known regex implementation (bionic's NetBSD regex
>>> implementation, say) for increased consistency.
>> By statically linking the binaries against bionic. :)
>>
>> (Did you ever fix the "hello world segfaults in a chroot that doesn't have
>> /dev/null because bionic's _start code does a lot with no error checking" issue?
> no, that's actually a deliberate crash. that's definitely not a
> supported _device_ configuration, and we deliberately minimize the
> differences between host and device. (it's 99% of the point of having
> host bionic in the first place!)
>
>>> That actually works pretty well, but portability.h has an #ifndef test
>>> for REG_STARTEND before including <regex.h> that gets in the way. To
>>> make up for that, this patch removes the unnecessary #include <regex.h>
>>> from grep.c itself.
>> Applied, but it's one measure of a whack-a-mole problem space.
> there's never going to be a "host bionic for macOS" anyway, so this is
> necessary if not sufficient.
>
> unfortunately, something (presumably a kernel or file system change)
> seems to have broken a dd test on cuttlefish, so that's the next thing
> i need to look at when i can find some time:
>
> FAIL: dd sync,noerror
> echo -ne "I WANT\n" > input
> echo -ne '' | dd if=input of=outFile seek=8860 bs=1M conv=sync,noerror
> 2>/dev/null &&
>     stat -c "%s" outFile && rm -f outFile
> --- expected 2020-10-29 16:10:58.647991948 -0500
> +++ actual 2020-10-29 16:10:58.667991947 -0500
> @@ -1 +1 @@
> -9291431936
> +701497344
>
>
>> Rob