The tools patch and diff make sense to include because they're simple text manipulation utilities that can be handy in embedded environments. "Make" and similar programs are universally meant to be a component of a compilation toolchain, something which is well outside the scope of BusyBox. Anything that's complex beyond a certain arbitrary point doesn't belong in BusyBox. That's why Dropbear (ssh), Perl, Python, Lua, Git, and several other extremely common programs are not present, despite the fact that their presence might be useful to some people. If you need make, build GNU make and distribute it alongside the BusyBox binary. Same for your favorite programming or scripting language. It's not hard to do.
A lot of people seem to think that there's zero penalty for including another program in something like BusyBox. I question the knowledge level of such people, because anyone who touches any remotely sizable programming project will quickly see that isolating portions is nearly impossible. Whenever you add an applet and there's a problem with it, someone has to fix it. If the maintainer decides to update the internal interfaces for something like getopt, then every applet has to be updated to fit that new interface, including your mim/make applet. There are maintenance and fix chores that will force other people to poke at your applet. You do not incur zero penalty for adding it to BusyBox. I don't agree with the tone used to disagree, but tone doesn't change the rationale behind the arguments, so I don't give a flip. People can be hardasses and insensitive and you can't let their tone get under your skin. You choose your response. Someone else's behavior doesn't excuse your own. The bottom line is that Make programs are a type of program that very clearly do not belong in BusyBox for philosophical and scope reasons, even if they cannot technically be added without much effort. I don't see much else to discuss on this subject. I applaud the effort, but I believe it is misguided. - Jody Bruchon -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
