Toybox hasn't always taken proper advantage of external contributions. Lots of people want to help, but their contributions languish out of tree or in the "pending" directory, awaiting cleanup.
Toybox's design goals require simpler, tighter, and more explicit code than most other implementations, among other reasons to allow better security auditing. Writing "another" implementation of standard command line tools isn't very interesting, they should be _better_ implementations. Unfortunately, this means existing, working commands often take more effort to clean up to Toybox's standards than writing a new one from scratch, not because they don't work, but because we require an unusual level of polish.
In hopes of teaching more people how to do this cleanup work, I've started breaking cleanup changes into smaller chunks and posting explanations of each change to the mailing list. Below are indexes of each cleanup series. Line/byte totals of completed series are given for scale, but the point of this work is simplicity, not size.
(Note: mercurial's web viewer doesn't follow renames, so the commit list links may not show the final version of each file moved from the "pending" directory to its final location. The summaries link the initial and cleaned versions of each file when giving line counts.)
General advice and/or policy:
Error messages and internationalization.
(I leave the Why not "bool"? explanation to Linus Torvalds.)
Rationale for removing debug code, the interesting bit says:
Rule of thumb: other people's debugging printfs are seldom as useful as your own debugging printfs. Because you know what your output _means_, and if you can't annotate the code to dump what you need you haven't read enough of it yet.
This is an example of cleaning up something that started in a condition most projects would be quite happy with. The initial submission of uuencode and uudecode was a good high quality contribution, written by a seasoned developer who did an excellent job. It was still possible to shrink uuencode almost by half:
Status: COMPLETE
I tried to do the uudecode cleanup in smaller stages:
Status: COMPLETE
The largest (ongoing) documented cleanup to date, still in progress:
Status: in progress.
814 Initial version by Gurang Shastri. 815 816 847 Felix Janda 848 Whitespace (reindent from tabs -> 2 spaces) 849 More cleanup 867 Felix Janda Improve operator processing. 874 Felix Janda 875 Felix Janda 887 Felix Janda fix -mtime
Status: in progress.
747 initial submission 810 whitespace 811 871 whitespace (reindent from 4 spaces to 2) 872 Felix Janda cleanup 885 Felix Janda move permission formatting (777 -> -rwxrwxrwx) from ls to lib so stat can reuse it. 886 Felix Janda remove unimplemented options and clean up help text 910 Felix Janda Add support for stating multiple files. 911 Felix Janda Separate stat and statfs. 912 commit description design pondering 914 916
Status: COMPLETE.