[adelie-devel]The future of BusyBox in Adélie
by A. Wilcox
Hi all,
Now that we are tightening up all our loose ends and trying to make this
a really solid 1.0 release, I was wondering what we want to do with
BusyBox. This is by far the worst package we ship in the entire distro:
packages$ find . -name '*.patch' | cut -d'/' -f3 | sort | uniq -c
[ ... ]
12 binutils
12 openssl
17 firefox-esr
17 qemu
33 busybox
The way I see it, there are a few options for it:
== Move to user/ ==
There is no reason for it to be in system/; it is not used by any system
dependency, nor is it essential to build or run the Adélie Core system.
Things would basically stay the same. We would continue to be at the
mercy of Alpine's patching, unless someone here really wants to take on
the worst package in packages.git. However, seeing as nobody should be
using it, I don't know that such a thing would be bad.
== Remove ==
Considering the brokenness[1][2][3] of BusyBox, we could remove it from
the repositories entirely. We may be able to compile a static coreutils
for recovery.
== Replace with Toybox ==
Since BusyBox is only packaged for static tools for recovery, we could
replace it with Toybox. While it is missing some functionality, it is
much closer to the standards and what a reasonable user would expect
from a recovery environment.
I'd like to resolve this before BETA2 if possible. Let's discuss!
Best,
--arw
[1]: https://www.mail-archive.com/busybox@busybox.net/msg25157.html
[2]: https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/9279
[3]: https://da.gd/buggybox
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Open-source programmer (C, C++, Python)
https://code.foxkit.us/u/awilfox/
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 2 months
State of packages for 1.0
by A. Wilcox
Hi all.
Following is a list of packages that I'm concerned about for 1.0. If
there is no response here about these issues, the offending packages
will probably be *REMOVED* from the distro (each package has a proposed
action at the end), so now is the time for people to speak up.
system/at
* does not work at all
Proposed action: find a different implementation of at(1) if possible
system/busybox
* useless package
* has absolutely no rdeps
* outdated and no hope of patching it for use ourselves
* has stupid conflicts with sysvinit and other packages
* broken tools like `awk`
* useless package
Proposed action: rm -r with extreme prejudice
system/fcron
* untested
* some vague reports that it doesn't work
Proposed action: see if it works, if not, move to legacy/
system/fortify-headers
* causes build failures and ICE on valid code on x86_64 and arm64
* does not even work / function at all on ppc64 ppc32 or armv7
Proposed action: rm -r
system/gcc
* Go support is broken on ppc64 (segfault)
* Go support doesn't compile on pmmx (uapi header issue)
* Ada support is broken on arm64, possibly others
Proposed action: remove Go and Ada support from Adélie
user/adelie-kde-theme
* uses window decos that are no longer online
* relies on aurora instead of breeze
Proposed action: replace with a Breeze theme that uses our deep red
user/libkdegames
* card decks that have PNG data embedded cause KPat to crash
Proposed action: remove decks that have PNG data embedded
Additionally, I am concerned about the issues I've been noting re XFCE
4. Can anyone confirm or deny that XFCE 4 is working as intended in
beta2? I'll try to see myself over the first week of 2019.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 4 months
RFC: devs metapackage
by A. Wilcox
Right now, we have 'lang' to pull in all -lang subpackages, and 'docs'
to pull in all -doc subpackages.
There have been a few people who have asked for a way to "automatically
install all -dev packages".
Therefore, I propose we create a 'devs' or 'dev' metapackage similar to
'docs' and 'lang' that installs all -dev packages that correspond to
packages that are installed on the system.
Thoughts?
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 4 months