[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
Status update: Alpha 2 missing packages list
by A. Wilcox
The following packages have been added:
accountsservice
atkmm
baloo-widgets
cairomm
catcodec
cgmanager
comfortaa
convertlit
cracklib
ctags
djvulibre
ebook-tools
evince
farstream
ffmpegthumbs
fontforge
fortune-mod
free42
glibmm
gnu-ghostscript
grfcodec
gtkmm+3.0
gxmessage
kdegraphics-thumbnailers
kgamma5
khotkeys
kmenuedit
ksshaskpass
libgxps
libkdcraw
libkexiv2
libmodplug
libmtp
libnice
libpwquality
libraw
libsecret
libsigc++
libspectre
libtommath
libuninameslist
musl-obstack
nml
opengfx
openmsx
opensfx
openttd
oxygen-fonts
pangomm
pavucontrol
plasma-workspace-wallpapers
postfix
py3-ply
recode
rpm2targz
scons
serf
sound-theme-freedesktop
subversion
sword
user-manager
utf8proc
w3m
The following three packages have not been done yet due to time constraints:
crda
gst-plugins-bad1.0
wireless-regdb
The following packages have been delayed for 1.0, or later, due to
ongoing issues preventing packaging:
avidemux
elfutils
gnome-desktop (gnome-common, gnome-icon-theme, gnome-terminal,
gnome-pty-helper, gvfs, gnome-themes-standard, nautilus)
py3-flask (deps: py3-jinja)
rtkit (dep of pulseaudio and WINE)
sphinx (deps: alabaster, snowballstemmer, sphinx_rtd_theme)
thin-provisioning-tools
xscreensaver (deps: netpbm)
The following packages will *not* be added to Adélie Linux at this time:
autogen - Gentoo specific config.sub update package; this functionality
is provided by abuild's update_config_sub function
daemontools/ucspi-tcp - Superseded by s6.
dnssec-root/unbound - a third DNS server is not required at this time.
gtk-engines-xfce - Deprecated and unmaintained upstream, for GTK+ 2 only.
ijs - Deprecated and superseded by Ghostscript.
libglade2.0 - Unmaintained upstream, for GTK+ 2 only.
libnet - Only required by arping, which is shipped as part of iputils now.
libunwind7 - Superseded by libexecinfo.
lightdm-gtk-greeter - Superseded by sddm.
myspell-en - Superseded by aspell.
radeontool - Deprecated and unmaintained upstream since 2008.
sdl-sound - No reverse dependencies.
sgml-common - No reverse dependencies.
syslog-ng - Superseded by sysklogd.
urt - Only used by NetPBM.
webrtc-audio-processing - Deprecated and unmaintained upstream.
xfce4-dev-tools - No reverse dependencies.
yelp-tools, yelp-xsl - Only needed by GNOME 3 packages when ./autogen.sh
is run. This can be packaged later if necessary.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 3 months
Weekly Status Report: 2019-01-14 to 2019-01-20
by A. Wilcox
Hello all!
This week has been mostly devoted to finishing up the missing packages
list from alpha2 (the packages that we shipped in alpha2 that were
removed/left unpackaged when we switched from ebuilds to APKBUILDs).
========
Web site
========
Top 5 referring URLs to the Web site:
145: without-systemd.org
106: Reddit
67: Google
24: Repology
17: Tie: DDG and MacRumors
Top 5 pages accessed (and homepage):
3130: /
300: /about.html
82: /about-qa.html
73: /announcements/1.0-BETA2.html
61: /contribute.html
54: /team.html
========
Packages
========
Netsurf and socat have been packaged, but have not yet been merged due
to the work on the alpha2 list.
Almost 70 packages have been added this week. See the section "General
discussion" for more about some new and changed packages.
==================
General discussion
==================
Currently, the alpha2 list has gone from 122 packages to 28 packages!
Some were removed because they are deprecated or removed upstream, but
most are now packaged.
Support for MTP (Media Transfer Protocol), used by many digital cameras,
has been added to KIO, VLC, and a few other packages. This means that
you should be able to download photos from many popular digital cameras
using Adélie Linux.
DjVu formatted ebooks are now supported in Okular. Additionally, the
Evince document viewer from GNOME has been packaged. Other book support
includes PostScript formatted documents via libspectre, and SWORD.
Our custom KDE theme has been tweaked. It now uses the Breeze style by
default, with our customary maroon title bar. We also now have our own
official set of wallpapers, courtesy of Horst Burkhardt (mc680x0) and A.
Wilcox (awilfox).
Free42, a scientific calculator, was ported to PowerPC and added to
Adélie Linux.
Ghostscript was added with CUPS helper support. This means most
printers are now supported by Adélie Linux. All printers tested were
able to print successfully, using Gutenprint!
This coming week should return to normal as the alpha2 list wraps up.
Best to you and yours,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 3 months
Weekly Status Report: 2019-01-07 to 2019-01-13
by A. Wilcox
Hello all!
I'd like to start writing weekly status reports about what is going on
around the project. This is also an easy way to catch up with what
happened for people who cannot, for any reason, read the IRC backlog.
========
Web site
========
The Adélie Web site had a large process overhaul, and a slight
reorganisation.
The Web site now has a functional template system, which means the nav
bar and footer only have to be changed one time (instead of on each HTML
file). This will allow us to ensure the site is kept up to date easier
and faster. The system uses simple POSIX Make, with grep and sed, so is
completely portable.
Meanwhile, the About page was split into separate Meet The Team, Q&A,
and About The Distro pages. Additionally, a section was added as a
'quick overview' of what we offer.
Top 5 referring URLs to the Web site:
114:
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Linux_distributions_without_sys...
58: Google searches
54:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6ka5oc/alpine_linux_usable_for_de...
18: DuckDuckGo searches
16: https://repology.org/repository/adelie_current
Top 5 pages accessed (and homepage):
3075: /
246: /about.html
51: /announcements/1.0-BETA2.html
48: /about-qa.html
46: /team.html
45: /contribute.html
These statistics generated by yours truly, using grep and awk on
privatised Apache logs.
====
Wiki
====
* awilfox@ and aerdan@ both catalogued their available hardware for
testing. The catalogue is available for reading at:
https://wiki.adelielinux.org/wiki/Project:Platform_Group/Available_hardware
* The Project:Roadmap pages were updated to reflect the BETA3 target.
=====
Image
=====
* The CD image system now supports mastering of multi-architecture
discs. It is still early days, requiring some manual intervention, but
the hope is that we will be able to generate a CD that has a GRUB menu
to select 32-bit or 64-bit kernel/userland. This will allow us to serve
more people with less resources. (For example, we'll only need to have
a single print run for x86 and PPC, not a 32-bit and a 64-bit for each.)
======
Shimmy
======
* The _NPROCESSORS_ONLN extension for getconf(1) has been added. This
is supported by glibc, Solaris, Mac OS X, and AIX, and is used by the
Linux kernel build system to determine the number of build jobs to run.
=======
gcompat
=======
* smauel fixed support for newer Linux kernels (v4.17+). He also
implemented pthread_getname_np and optional obstack support, and cleaned
up some of the code.
=========
Packaging
=========
* aerdan@ bumped some Perl packages, and ensured all Perl packages have
the proper owner (the Adélie Perl Team). He also bumped some aspell
dictionaries that have newer third-party releases, and many other packages.
* skarnet@ bumped system/utmps, fixing a bug in wtmpd.
* aerdan@ added:
* * user/pcmanfm, a lightweight file manager for X11.
* * user/uptimed.
* * And a few others.
* awilfox@ fixed system/ca-certificates to generate the /etc/ssl
directory correctly when installing to a chroot. They also added:
* * user/adwaita-icon-theme, ensuring Gtk3 apps have proper toolbar icons.
* * user/gnumeric, a spreadsheet application.
* * user/gnu-ghostscript, which allows PostScript files to be
manipulated, and is a requirement of many CUPS printer drivers.
* * user/jpegoptim and user/optipng, image optimisers.
* * user/nfs-utils, for network file sharing.
* * user/openttd, a game.
* * user/rdesktop, for RDP connections to Windows® computers.
* * And many others, mostly from the alpha7 and alpha2 missing package
lists.
* multiplexd, a relative newcomer, has also been busy! He added:
* * user/abiword and its dependencies, a light-weight word processor.
* * user/nftables and its dependencies, a firewall and NAT system.
==================
General discussion
==================
Issues with nouveau were shaken out; on ppc64, a special Xorg.conf
setting is required to prevent improper behaviour and coloured lines.
Additionally, a Pentium 4 test box was set up in the main Tulsa lab so
that the pmmx architecture can be better tested going forward.
Obligatory screenshot: http://corgiwolf.me/linux/pentium4.png
Support for "RAW" digital camera image files was added to Krita,
ImageMagick, KStars, GwenView, and KPhotoAlbum.
Here's to a great week ahead,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 3 months
Outstanding packages from alpha7 list
by A. Wilcox
Hi all,
As a notice, the following packages will not be brought to 1.0 unless
another contributor packages them. This list is a part of the "alpha7
missing list", which are packages that we shipped when we were an Alpine
fork. When we converted to our own package tree, these packages were
deemed unfit to "bring with us" and needed to be completely repackaged.
clamav
Complex and not actively used by any of our current users.
cpputest
Build-time test suite software unused by any software we package.
enca
Unmaintained encoding guessing library (like libguess, which we already
ship via audacious-plugins) that was, at one time, used by libass for
closed captioning. Has not been used in years.
eventlog
Build-time dependency for syslog-ng, which we have replaced with sysklog.
gcr
Cryptography library used by GNOME. We don't currently ship GNOME; this
will be revisited if/when we do.
glade3
RAD user interface design tool. Unused by any software we package.
jbig2dec
GNU's fork is unmaintained and outdated, with possible security holes.
Only used to compress monochromatic scanned images. Virtually useless.
libasyncns
No longer used by any software we package.
libdaemon
Dependency of avahi, which we have not yet ported. This will be
revisited if/when we port avahi.
libmilter
Only used by ClamAV. Will be revisited if/when we ship ClamAV.
libnfsidmap
Deprecated and replaced by nfs-utils.
libusb-compat
Only used by old versions of BlueZ.
libxp, libxres
Only used by Motif, which we no longer ship.
motif
Not currently used by any software we package. This will be revisited
if we consider shipping software that uses the Motif widget set.
mtools
Unnecessary as we ship dosfstools.
postfix
Complex and unused by any current user of Adélie.
tslib
Only used by DirectFB, which we shipped at one point for attempted
compatibility with postmarketOS but no longer ship.
xf86-video-*
Most of the video drivers we don't ship are massively out of date and no
longer compile against the newest X.Org server. Those that do can be
considered at a later date.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 3 months
Leftover references to Alpine
by A. Wilcox
Since we are no longer downstream of Alpine, we should really clean up
the final references in our packages to Alpine. (I'd hate for a user of
one of our packages to think they need to go to Alpine for help.)
system/:
* apk-tools
Not sure what we could do here, except change the URL to be our URL and
change the description to be "Package management software" or such.
* gzip
References an Alpine bug report that appears to not even exist any more.
* libc-dev
URL is set to Alpine's home page. This whole package can probably be
removed since we likely won't change libcs. musl-dev can provide
libc-dev, bsd-compat-headers can be moved to its own package, and then
libc-dev can be removed. If we decide at a later date to have multiple
libcs, we can always put it back.
* paxmark
Alpine distribution. Not sure if we need it any more since we don't
support PaX anyway.
* tzdata
We need to create and ship our own data.
* zsh
References 'packages Alpine don't ship'. We need to go through this,
determine if we ship any, and then remove the comment.
user/:
* grub
We need to completely rework how GRUB configuration works before 1.0.
This is a mess and a nightmare for users.
* libcanberra
Source is hosted on http: alpinelinux.org??? Surely this can't be right.
* pcsc-lite
References Alpine bug IDs.
* rtmpdump
Alpine distribution. We need to package it ourselves.
* xautolock
References an Alpine commit re: aarch64 support. Investigate and remove
the comment.
Best to you and yours in 2019,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 4 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
X.Org and Mesa drivers
by A. Wilcox
Hello all, and happy new year!
A common complaint on IRC, Reddit, etc is how hard it is to get X.Org
running on Adélie. I'm working on metapackages to make X.Org much
easier to set up.
One requirement I came across that I feel warrants further discussion is
the relation between mesa-dri- drivers and xf86-video- drivers.
Right now, xf86-video-fbdev has no mesa-dri-* driver dependency. It
should likely depend on swrast. However, that brings up another key
point: xorg-server ships with the modesetting driver (equivalent to
xf86-video-modesetting). Should the X11 server pull mesa-dri-swrast
unconditionally?
This may make sense because if mesa-dri-* fails to load, it will always
try to fall back to swrast (which can at least allow the user to bring
up a desktop and try to figure out what went wrong).
However, it also means that all X.Org installations will pull in the
heavy LLVM 6 library package. Adding mesa-dri-swrast to a ppc64
computer with an otherwise-empty world (just adelie-base-posix
xorg-server) yields a difference of 72 MB (635 vs 563). If you do not
plan on using any OpenGL software (raw X11 framebuffer on modesetting
using twm, or such), this is a large waste of space... Is that really
likely, though?
Does anyone even know of anyone who uses X11 without OpenGL? If not, we
should probably add swrast to xorg-server's dependencies.
Let's discuss.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org
2 years, 4 months
