Rob Landley
2011-11-20 01:06:37 UTC
I'm getting several questions about the toybox relaunch. I guess I
haven't properly explained myself, so here's a cut and paste of an email
I sent somebody:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The website is http://landley.net/toybox and the repository is
http://landley.net/hg/toybox .
When I handed off BusyBox maintainership in 2006 I started over from
scratch with a complete redesign, trying to figure out what the common
infrastructure _should_ look like.
http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#28-09-2006
Busybox was never properly _designed_, it just sort of accumulated and
got retroactively cleaned up. For example, adding a command in toybox
means adding a file to the "toys" directory: you don't have to touch any
other files, it detects what's there and uses it. Adding a command to
busybox involved touching five different files. The help infrastructure
was nuts, the option parsing infrastructure was nuts... lots of things
needed a rethink.
I spent a year and change working out the interesting design issues:
http://landley.net/toybox/design.html
http://landley.net/toybox/code.html
and then got busy with other things. Around 2009 I mothballed the project:
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#18-06-2009
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#24-08-2009
Last week Tim Bird (of the Consumer Electronic Linux Forum) poked me and
mentioned:
1) how deeply pathetic Android's toolbox is (I was unaware of the sheer
scale of the sadness)
2) how various corporations were looking around for a BSD-licensed
alternative to busybox. (He thought I was still a consultant and asked
if I was interested in being hired ot fix this. I reminded him about
toybox, and how I owned the copyright to that and could license it
however I wanted to...)
So over the weekend did a triage pass on my code to contact third party
contributors and rip out the code of people I didn't have current
contact info for, and relicensed it 2-clause BSD:
http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/378
And now I'm going through my old todo lists and collating them...
Rob
haven't properly explained myself, so here's a cut and paste of an email
I sent somebody:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The website is http://landley.net/toybox and the repository is
http://landley.net/hg/toybox .
When I handed off BusyBox maintainership in 2006 I started over from
scratch with a complete redesign, trying to figure out what the common
infrastructure _should_ look like.
http://landley.net/notes-2006.html#28-09-2006
Busybox was never properly _designed_, it just sort of accumulated and
got retroactively cleaned up. For example, adding a command in toybox
means adding a file to the "toys" directory: you don't have to touch any
other files, it detects what's there and uses it. Adding a command to
busybox involved touching five different files. The help infrastructure
was nuts, the option parsing infrastructure was nuts... lots of things
needed a rethink.
I spent a year and change working out the interesting design issues:
http://landley.net/toybox/design.html
http://landley.net/toybox/code.html
and then got busy with other things. Around 2009 I mothballed the project:
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#18-06-2009
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#24-08-2009
Last week Tim Bird (of the Consumer Electronic Linux Forum) poked me and
mentioned:
1) how deeply pathetic Android's toolbox is (I was unaware of the sheer
scale of the sadness)
2) how various corporations were looking around for a BSD-licensed
alternative to busybox. (He thought I was still a consultant and asked
if I was interested in being hired ot fix this. I reminded him about
toybox, and how I owned the copyright to that and could license it
however I wanted to...)
So over the weekend did a triage pass on my code to contact third party
contributors and rip out the code of people I didn't have current
contact info for, and relicensed it 2-clause BSD:
http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/378
And now I'm going through my old todo lists and collating them...
Rob