Hello. I wonder who/how decides to enable/disable various config options in the 3 different flavours of busybox packages. There are a lot of differences between the configs which - in my opinion - should not be there.
For example: md5sum -c (check) is enabled for udeb flavour, but not for regular deb or static flavour. Udeb is supposed to be smaller, yet it contains extra feature like this, and there's no reason this particular feature should not be enabled in 2 regular flavours. Another example, -m option for tar (FEATURE_TAR_NOPRESERVE_TIME) is enabled for deb and udeb flavours but is not enabled for static flavour. Why? Long time ago modutils implementation were disabled in busybox, mostly due to their brokeness. People hoped that for etch or lenny it will come back, but it was quite some years ago. Nowadays, busybox module support is mature enough to go on-par with module-init-tools, but the applets are still disabled. Is there any particular reason for this? Debian BTS has lots of wishlist items about enabling various features, especially for the udeb flavour. And now I come to my second question: what's the purpose of busybox and 3 different flavours of the package? Should it enable all features as is done for most other packages, or just a few selected (by whom? for what?) applets/features? How the udeb is used? Is it supposed to contain some rescue tools so that one can boot from an installer CD (or even from a netboot image) and the included busybox is useful for some system maintenance? How really small it should be nowadays, when even the kernel does not fit in a floppy anymore - is there a reason to try hard to keep it small? How the static flavour is used? Is it supposed to contain everything that regular deb contains? If not, why? Regular deb and static flavours are linked against libm - for two applets, awk and dc (FEATURE_AWK_LIBM and FEATURE_DC_LIBM). Is this really necessary for something? Where dc and awk are used _and_ math support is required? I'd like to make the set of enabled features/options to be more or less the same, at least between the two regular debs (since udeb is really special as it's used by d-i only), and enable some more applets. Nowadays, busybox is almost enough to act as a complete rescue system in initramfs - everything from module loading to mounting the root filesystem is implemented and works, including nfs root, live CD and other fun stuff. Some subsystems need their own tools, for example mdadm and lvm, iscsi and similar. I even used busybox-only initramfs to fix/rescue boot problems on remote machines - boot into initramfs, bring up the network (not normally done), run nc -l -e sh and connect to this port from remote machine to perform diagnostics and to fix boot issues. All this with a busybox binary which is just a bit larger than the one currently used in Debian, but without libm (so the resulting initramfs image is smaller). I'd like to bring this functionality and flexibility to Debian. Thanks! /mjt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-boot-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4cff855f.1010...@msgid.tls.msk.ru