diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'TODO')
| -rw-r--r-- | TODO | 100 |
1 files changed, 98 insertions, 2 deletions
@@ -2,10 +2,106 @@ Busybox TODO Stuff that needs to be done ----- tr - missing SuS3 features in busybox 1.0pre10 tr doesnt support [:blank:], [:digit:] or other predefined classes, [=equiv=] support is also missing. ---- - +find + doesn't understand () or -exec, and these are actually used out in the real + world. The "make uninstall" of lots of things (including busybox itself) + breaks because of this, and sometimes even "make install" (like udev). +---- +comm + Perl needs "comm" to build. It's small and simple, but we haven't got it. +--- +sh + The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different + shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't + work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not + being reentrant. Unifying the various shells and figuring out a configurable + way of adding the minimal set of bash features a given script uses is a big + job, but it be a big improvement. +--- +gzip + Can't handle compressing multiple files at once. (I don't mean making a + multiple file archive, I mean compressing more than one file at a time.) + Some global variables aren't re-initialized between runs. +--- +gunzip + same problem as gzip. "gunzip one.gz two.gz three.gz" doesn't work for + two.gz and three.gz due to global variables not getting reset. +--- +diff + We should have a diff -u command. We have patch, we should have diff + (we only need to support unified diffs though). +--- +patch + should have -i support, and simple fuzz factor support to apply patches + at an offset shouldn't take up too much space. +--- +man + It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or + anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly + compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that + calls cat/zcatbzcat | more +--- +less + More sucks if you're used to less. A tiny less implementation would be + very nice. +--- +bzip2 + Compression-side support. + + +Architectural issues: + +Do a SUSv3 audit + Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at + "http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and + figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that + we might actually care about. + + Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that + exercises each command line option and the various corner cases. +-- +Unify archivers + Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory + traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could + be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file", + "add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on. + + This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar + write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs someday, + if it becomes relevant. +--- +Text buffer support. + Several existing applets and potential additions (sort, vi, less...) read + a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity + for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb... +--- +Individual compilation of applets. + It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets, + for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu + utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big + executable. + + Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb + could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less + got the code for (like zlib). +--- +buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option + Busybox is now capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use, + such as developing software or in a live CD. A system built from busybox + (1.00 with updated sort.c), uclibc 0.9.27, gcc, binutils, make, and a few + other development tools (http://www.landley.net/code/firmware has an example + system using autoconf, automake, bison, flex, libtools, m4, zlib, + and groff: dunno what subset of that is actually necessary) is capable of + rebuilding itself, from scratch, under itself. + + It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option + of using busybox instead of bzip2, coreutils, file, findutils, gawk, grep, + inetutils, modutils, net-tools, procps, sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, + util-linux, and vim. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we + can fix. (It would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to + replace bash, diffutils, gzip, less, and patch as well.) |