From 8f90d3aa019ff89e19e0977c22be8b73c92109a3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Rob Landley Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2012 23:58:40 -0500 Subject: More web page roadmap/status update stuff. --- www/roadmap.html | 233 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 233 insertions(+) create mode 100755 www/roadmap.html (limited to 'www/roadmap.html') diff --git a/www/roadmap.html b/www/roadmap.html new file mode 100755 index 00000000..de9e826f --- /dev/null +++ b/www/roadmap.html @@ -0,0 +1,233 @@ + +Toybox Roadmap + +

Goals and use cases

+ +

We have several potential use cases for a new set of command line +utilities, and are using those to determine which commands to implement +for Toybox's 1.0 release.

+ +

Our current candidate list combines the commands toybox already implements, +the development environment command list, the toolbox standard commands, +various vendor configurations of busybox, a selected subset of the SUSv4 +standard, a couple of the less-insane bits of LSB, a few outright requests, +plus additional to-be-determined shell functionality.

+ +

See the status page for the combined list +and progress towards implementing it.

+ +
+ +

Use case: standards compliance.

+ +

POSIX-2008/SUSv4

+

The best standards are the kind that describe reality, rather than +attempting to impose a new one. (I.E. a good standard should document, not +legislate.)

+ +

The kind of standards which describe existing reality tend to be approved by +more than one standards body, such ANSI and ISO both approving C. That's why +the IEEE POSIX committee's 2008 standard, the Single Unix Specification version +4, and the Open Group Base Specification edition 7 are all the same standard +from three sources.

+ +

The "utilities" +section +of these standards is devoted to the unix command line, and are the best such +standard for our purposes. (My earlier work on BusyBox was implemented with +regard to SUSv3, an earlier version of this standard.)

+ +

Problems with the standard

+ +

Unfortunately, these standards describe a subset of reality, lacking any +mention of commands such as init, login, or mount required to actually boot a +system. It provides ipcrm and ipcs, but not ipcmk, so you can use System V IPC +resources but not create them.

+ +

These standards also contain a large number of commands that are +inappropriate for toybox to implement in its 1.0 release. (Perhaps some of +these could be reintroduced in later releases, but not now.)

+ +

Starting with the full "utilities" list, we first remove generally obsolete +commands (compess ed ex pr uncompress uccp uustat uux), commands for the +pre-CVS "SCCS" source control system (admin delta get prs rmdel sact sccs unget +val what), fortran support (asa fort77), and batch processing support (batch +qalter qdel qhold qmove qmsg qrerun qrls qselect qsig qstat qsub).

+ +

Some commands are for a compiler toolchain (ar c99 cflow ctags cxref gencat +iconv lex m4 make nm strings strip tsort yacc), which is outside of toybox's +mandate and should be supplied externally. (Again, some of these may be +revisited later, but not for toybox 1.0.)

+ +

Some commands are part of a command shell, and cannot be implemented as +separate executables (alias bg cd command fc fg getopts hash jobs kill read +type ulimit umask unalias wait). These may be revisited as part of a built-in +toybox shell, but are not exported into $PATH via symlinks. (If you fork a +child process and have it "cd" then exit, you've accomplished nothing.)

+ +

A few other commands are judgement calls, providing command-line +internationalization support (iconv locale localedef), System V inter-process +communication (ipcrm ipcs), and cross-tty communication from the minicomputer +days (talk mesg write). The "pax" utility was supplanted by tar, "mailx" is +a command line email client, and "lp" submits files for printing to... what +exactly? (cups?) The standard defines crontab but not crond.

+ +

Removing all of that leaves the following commands, which toybox should +implement:

+ +
+ +at awk basename bc cal cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm cp +csplit cut date dd df diff dirname du echo env expand expr false file find +fold fuser getconf grep head id join kill link ln logger logname ls man +mkdir mkfifo more mv newgrp nice nl nohup od paste patch pathchk printf ps +pwd renice rm rmdir sed sh sleep sort split stty tabs tail tee test time +touch tput tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode uuencode vi wc +who xargs zcat + +
+ +

Linux Standard Base

+ +

One attempt to supplement POSIX towards an actual usable system was the +Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, the quality of this "standard" is +fairly low.

+ +

POSIX allowed its standards process to be compromised +by leaving things out, thus allowing IBM mainframes and Windows NT to drive +a truck through the holes and declare themselves compilant. But it means what +they DID standardize tends to be respected.

+ +

The Linux Standard Base's failure mode is different, they respond to +pressure by including special-case crap, such as allowing Red Hat to shoehorn +RPM on the standard even though all sorts of distros (from Debian to Slackware) +don't use it and probably never will. This means anything in the LSB is +at best a suggestion: arbitrary portions of this standard are widely +ignored.

+ +

The LSB does specify a list of command line +utilities:

+ +
+ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep +fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups +gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls +lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd +patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync +tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat +
+ +

Where posix specifies one of those commands, LSB's deltas tend to be +accomodations for broken tool versions which aren't up to date with the +standard yet. (See more and xargs +for examples.)

+ +

Since we've already committed to using our own judgement to skip bits of +POSIX, and LSB's "judgement" in this regard is purely bug workarounds to declare +various legacy tool implementations "compliant", this means we're mostly +interested in the set of tools that aren't specified in posix at all.

+ +

Of these, gettext and msgfmt are internationalization, install_initd and +remove_initd aren't present on ubuntu 10.04, lpr is out of scope, and +lsb_release is a distro issue (it's a nice command, but the output of +lsb_release -a is the name and version number of the linux distro you're +running, which toybox doesn't know).

+ +

This leaves:

+ +
+ +chfn chsh dmesg egrep fgrep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups +gunzip gzip hostname install killall md5sum +mknod mktemp mount passwd pidof sendmail seq shutdown +su sync tar umount useradd userdel usermod zcat + +
+ +
+ +

Use case: provide a self-hosting development environment

+ +

The following commands are enough to build the Aboriginal Linux development +environment, boot it to a shell prompt, and build Linux From Scratch 6.8 under +it. (Aboriginal Linux currently uses BusyBox for this, thus provides a +drop-in test environment for toybox. We install both implementations side +by side, redirecting the symlinks a command at a time until the older +package is no longer used, and can be removed.)

+ +

This use case includes running init scripts and other shell scripts, running +configure, make, and install in each package, and providing basic command line +facilities such as a text editor. (It does not include a compiler toolchain or +C library, those are outside the scope of this project.)

+ +
+ +bzcat cat cp dirname echo env patch rmdir sha1sum sleep sort sync +true uname wc which yes zcat +awk basename bzip2 chmod chown cmp cut date dd diff +egrep expr find grep gzip head hostname id install ln ls +mkdir mktemp mv od readlink rm sed sh tail tar touch tr uniq +wget whoami xargs chgrp comm gunzip less logname man split +tee test time bunzip2 chgrp chroot comm cpio dmesg +dnsdomainname ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip ifconfig init less +logname losetup man mdev mount mountpoint nc pgrep pkill +pwd route split stat switch_root tac umount vi + +
+ +

Note: Aboriginal Linux installs bash 2.05b as #!/bin/sh and its scripts +require bash extensions not present in shells such as busybox ash. +This means that toysh needs to supply several bash extensions _and_ work +when called under the name "bash".

+ +
+ +

Use case: Replacing Android Toolbox

+ +

Full toolbox command set

+ +

Here is the full list of toolbox commands: +

+
+alarm cat chmod chown cmp cp date dd df dmesg getevent getprop hd id ifconfig +iftop insmod ioctl kill ln log ls lsmod mkdir mount mv netstat newfs_msdos notify +pidof printenv ps renice rm rmdir rmmod route schedtop sendevent setconsole +setprop sleep smd start stop sync toolbox top umount vmstat watchprops wipe +
+ +

The following Toolbox commands are reasonably standardized:

+ +
+ +cat chmod chown cmp cp date dd df dmesg id ifconfig iftop insmod ioctl ionice +kill ln ls lsmod lsof mkdir mount mv netstat newfs_msdos notify +ps printenv reboot renice rm rmdir rmmod route +sleep start stop sync top umount uptime vmstat + +
+ +

Android-specific commands

+

Toolbox also provides the following nonstandard commands, which are unique +to Android (or at least do not appear in Ubuntu or SUSv4):

+ +
+ +alarm hd getevent getprop ioctl log nandread notify +r schedtop sendevent setconsole setprop smd watchprops wipe + +
+ +
+

Requests:

+ +

The following additional commands have been requested by various users:

+
+ +freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root +poweroff sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath traceroute unzip +usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help + +
+ + + -- cgit v1.2.3