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

[enh]

On Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 20:02 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> 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.)
>

If you click on the bot's name it takes you to a page that explains that
only "established users" can link to sites like YouTube, to prevent spam.

Since I always make anonymous edits I can't help you there.

(I've addressed the other stuff though. Luckily I found a CL from one of
the build guys that lets me not be a disallowed primary source for the
"also used to *build* Android" stuff I added at the same time 😃)

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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>
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