First quick stab at organizing TODO under whose TODO item it is.

This commit is contained in:
Rob Landley 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +00:00
parent 80b8ff07ca
commit df4cdaf341

197
TODO
View File

@ -1,28 +1,111 @@
Busybox TODO Busybox TODO
Stuff that needs to be done. All of this is fair game for 1.2. Stuff that needs to be done. This is organized by who plans to get around to
doing it eventually, but that doesn't mean they "own" the item. If you want to
do one of these bounce an email off the person it's listed under to see if they
have any suggestions how they plan to go about it, and to minimize conflicts
between your work and theirs. But otherwise, all of these are fair game.
build system Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>:
Migrate calloc() and bb_calloc() occurrences to bb_xzalloc().
Remove obsolete _() wrapper crud for internationalization we don't do.
Figure out where we need utf8 support, and add 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. I'm writing a new shell (bbsh) to unify the various
shells and configurably add the minimal set of bash features people
actually use. The hardest part is it has to configure down as small as
lash while providing lash's features. The rest is easy in comparison.
bzip2
Compression-side support.
init
General cleanup.
Unify base64 handling.
There's base64 encoding and decoding going on in:
networking/wget.c:base64enc()
coreutils/uudecode.c:read_base64()
coreutils/uuencode.c:tbl_base64[]
networking/httpd.c:decodeBase64()
And probably elsewhere. That needs to be unified into libbb functions.
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.
Internationalization
How much internationalization should we do?
The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this.
(Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?)
We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this
into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.
We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we
can cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to
concern ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a
config option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)
What level should things happen at? How much do we care about
internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
"unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
--unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font
loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)
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 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world
use, such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source
code). This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or
equivalents.
It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
packages. 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 and
diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
initramfs
Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on
bbsh, mdev, and switch_root.
Bernhard Fischer <rep.nop@anon.at>:
Makefile stuff:
make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm
Make sure that the flags get pinned in e.g. Rules.mak so when expanding them
later on you get the cached result without the need to re-evaluate them. As yet unclaimed:
---- ----
find find
doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff. doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff.
---- ----
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 would be a big improvement.
Note: Rob Landley (rob@landley.net) is working on a new unified shell called
bbsh, but it's a low priority...
---
diff diff
Also, make sure we handle empty files properly: Make sure we handle empty files properly:
From the patch man page: From the patch man page:
   you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares    you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares
@ -45,18 +128,9 @@ man
(How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.) (How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
--- ---
bzip2
Compression-side support.
---
init
General cleanup.
---
ar ar
Write support? Write support?
--- ---
mdev
Micro-udev.
---
crond crond
turn FEATURE_DEBUG_OPT into ENABLE_FEATURE_CROND_DEBUG_OPT turn FEATURE_DEBUG_OPT into ENABLE_FEATURE_CROND_DEBUG_OPT
@ -74,46 +148,6 @@ bb_close() with fsync()
You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(), You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(),
but that can have a big performance impact. So make it a config option. but that can have a big performance impact. So make it a config option.
--- ---
Unify base64 handling.
There's base64 encoding and decoding going on in:
networking/wget.c:base64enc()
coreutils/uudecode.c:read_base64()
coreutils/uuencode.c:tbl_base64[]
networking/httpd.c:decodeBase64()
And probably elsewhere. That needs to be unified into libbb functions.
---
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.
---
Internationalization
How much internationalization should we do?
The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this.
(Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?)
We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this
into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.
We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we can
cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to concern
ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a config
option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)
What level should things happen at? How much do we care about
internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
"unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
--unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font
loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)
---
Unify archivers Unify archivers
Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory
traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
@ -129,39 +163,6 @@ Text buffer support.
a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity 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... 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 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source code).
This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or equivalents.
It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
packages. 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 and
diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
---
initramfs
Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on
bbsh, mdev, and switch_root.
---
Memory Allocation Memory Allocation
We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much. allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much.