This has been most frustrating. tl,dr - Getting boxes into toybox has entirely failed for four years, which has blocked the progress of both. Let's do something about that.
I've been trying for years (since 2011) to get my generic editor code (boxes) into toybox, so far with zero movement on that front. Now Rob has added two editors he wrote himself, and from what I can tell wants to just write it all himself. Not to mention a few other things that my generic code covers, where written by others, and have been included already. Boxes covers emacs, joe (Wordstar), less, mcedit (the editor I actually use), more, nano, and vi. It also covers the ed style modes of those things that include one. It could cover a few other things as well, for instance I wrote an example shell that just demonstrates how it could be used in toysh. It could share code with sed, and now hexedit. It's time for me to make a decision about what to do with boxes. Four years with no movement is ridiculous. People keep wanting me to finish it, "Rob wont put it into toybox" just isn't an acceptable response for me to give after four years. I'm putting this on the public mailing list so that those who are actually interested can provide some feedback to help inform my decision. Some actual useful feedback from Rob that progresses this instead of just sitting on it forever would be great to. So far the only actual objection you have given to me Rob is that it's too big a blob for you to grok. So I cut out a bit of it, to see if you could at least handle a small part of it, even though it was too small to be actually useful. You ignored that to. That's a problem, a generic editor is just too big, even if it's cut down to "barely usable editor". Sure it can be cut down into bite size bits, but none of those bits will be useful at all. So this has been the big blocker, Rob wants bite sized bits, this doesn't break down into bite sized bits, and Rob aint putting it in, not even to pending, unless it's bite sized bits. Me completing it by fleshing out the missing editing functions wont make it any more bite sized, that has to wait until it's in toybox. Once it is in, fleshing it out CAN be done in bite sized bits. Every now and then Rob you say "I want to write this", and I usually reply "I've written this for you already", sometimes you respond with "we'll talk about it later", then later never comes. Mostly you just ignore it. Despite the fact that it covers a lot of things that you keep saying you want to add. So, what are my choices? 0) Try to convince Rob to just dump it into pending. Then we can all work on it to make it great. 1) Keep waiting another four years in the forlorn hope that Rob actually does something with it. 2) Fork toybox and just add it myself. 3) Write it as a drop in module for toybox. 4) Rewrite it to be entirely separate from toybox. 5) Just forget about it, and wait four or more years for Rob to write his versions of a bunch of things. 6) Insert choices I haven't thought of here. Choice 0) is what I have been trying to do for four years. I'm a computer programmer, not a marketing droid, I can't sell for shit. Obviously this isn't working. Time to move on, reluctantly. Choice 1) doesn't cut it for me, coz one of the reasons I was motivated to write this in the beginning is that I want to use it myself. In four years I could have actually completed enough of this to actually be useful to a large number of people, including myself. Time to move on. Choice 2) is something I really don't want to do. That's way more work for me, and creates competition where I wanted to cooperate. Just as Rob didn't want to compete against busybox at one point, I don't want to compete against toybox editors, for basically the same reasons. Choice 3) might work, I'm not sure yet if such a thing is possible. Though then Rob will still write his own versions, coz mine will only get bigger as I flesh it out to full editing functions, so he wont be able to grok it. The big problem here is that there's lots of code that could be shared between boxes and other parts of toybox. Rob might not accept patches to deal with this, if the history of boxes is anything to go by. Choice 4) is workable, as the toybox library stuff I use isn't that hard to replace, and I could even just use those parts directly, as I would use a similar license to the toybox one, which allows that. This would be just another implementation of a bunch of editors, so likely I'd be the only one using it. This wont help toybox at all. Choice 5) isn't really an option for me, but is likely what will happen judging by how things have gone so far. Choice 6) - this is where you people can lend a hand if you can come up with other choices for me. Maybe someone else could convince Rob where I cant. Maybe sending push requests from the boxes github to the toybox github would help get it in. I dunno what else will work, make suggestions. One of the stated goals of toybox is to help turn Android into a development environment. A development environment needs a text editor. Rob has stated that there is some urgency in getting this done. If boxes hadn't spent most of the last four years in limbo, we would be a lot closer to that goal by now. Robs TODO list from hell isn't getting any smaller if Robs gonna write stuff I've already written. Stuff I've been very willing to keep writing for the last four years, if only it had gotten into toybox so that we can continue. Another thing to bring up is that I had discussed on this mailing list before my desire to implement Midnight Commander (mc) as part of toybox. Something that Rob agreed to in principle at least. Mc actually works well as an IDE, it's been my IDE of choice for a very long time. So this might be good for the "Android development environment" goal. It could share a lot of code with boxes. The integration of mc and a shell is something I wanted to make better, so this could mean some cooperation between boxes and toysh. The big problem here is that I don't want to write a shell, I'm very happy for Rob to do that, he has the experience there that I don't. Toysh could even use some of the boxes infrastructure. Another good reason to choose 0), but ... Can't we just fucking get on with it now? 3) and 4) I guess are my best options if Rob really wants to just ignore my work and do it all himself. Sure, I really really really REALLY want choice 0), but it just ain't happening. B-( -- A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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