On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:22:25 -0700 "K. Richard Pixley" <rich.pixley@access-company.com> wrote: > I'm confused about the busybox package. I mean, I'm familiar with > busybox and it's applications. However, I'm wondering... > > If there a reason why busybox should not be packaged in such a way as to > provide a mutually exclusive alternative with the packages that it > supplants such as coreutils? One reason is that busybox doesn't come with an 'uninstall' option, just an install. I've been bitten by that many times. It's a bit of a fiddle finding the busybox versions and removing them. It is probably safer to not activate busybox by default than to risk an imperfect uninstall script in postrm that leaves the system with a damaged coreutils setup. Reinstalling coreutils won't always fix the issue either. (For the uninitiated, you install the busybox package then run an install command on the system and it is this that puts the busybox executable in place so that it replaces the functionality of 'ls' etc. the difficulty is that precisely which commands get replaced is entirely down to the configuration chosen by the user *prior* to running the install command.) I guess the second reason is that configuration step - it allows busybox to be customised prior to activation but I may be wrong on that. Have you asked the busybox maintainer? > It seems to me that intuitively, the > busybox package should do exactly that, yet the package we have now does > not. Emdebian certainly needs busybox to work that way - I'm guessing that the busybox maintainer expects that kind of functionality from a busybox-udeb. (Which, IIRC, busybox can build.) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
Attachment:
pgp3fvgKMzvWh.pgp
Description: PGP signature