Re: RFC: moving busybox into its own .deb
On Sun, Jan 16, 2000 at 09:42:25AM -0700, Erik Andersen wrote:
> On Sun Jan 16, 2000 at 04:01:34PM +0100, Eric Delaunay wrote:
> > Erik Andersen wrote:
> > > I've been having a bit of difficulty managing busybox
> > > for the boot floppies.
> > >
> > > At the moment, I have my own busybox CVS source tree where I do primary
> > > development, and where I apply and test patches sent to me, and generally
> > > add/develop/break stuff. In addition, there is also the boot-floppies CVS
> > > source tree, to which contributions are added fairly regularly (which is a good
> > > thing, and makes both the boot-floppies and busybox better). However, this is
> > > also a real pain.
> > >
> > > When I make changes to my CVS tree, I have to manually merge the changes into
> > > the boot-floppies tree. When folks add changes to the boot-floppies tree, I
> > > have to manually merge those changes back into my local CVS tree. And in the
> > > process, of cource, things like $Id fields always get screwed up.
> > >
> > > I'd like to get some comments on my splitting busybox out from the
> > > boot-floppies tree, and instead being provided by a .deb (just like ash, the
> > > kernel, and several of the other tools). If I go ahead and split it out into a
> > > .deb, is this the type of change that would have to wait till after the potato
> > > release?
> >
> > I have to objection you make a Debian package for your busybox provided the
> > fact that you build it based on the boot-floppies needs (i.e. configuration
> > file from boot-floppies tree).
> > IMO, you will have to add a "conflicts: sysvinit, fileutils" rule (maybe
> > others too) to ensure that your package will never be installed in a debian
> > system. That will break it I think.
> > This way, it will only be used in boot-floppies build process.
> >
>
> Thanks for the support. I assume you mean "I have no objection to" instead of
> "I have to objection" (which have opposite meanings) based on the context of
> the rest of your message. The conflicts line would actually read something
> like:
>
> Conflicts: bsdutils, fileutils, findutils, grep, gzip, mount, procps,
> shellutils, sysklogd, sysutils, sysvinit, tar, textutils, util-linux
>
> Yes, it would be exclusivly for the boot-floppies tree (just like ash is
> alledegly supposed to be exclusivly for the boot-floppies even though in
> practice that doesn't seem to be the case or else bugs like (Bug #50788) would
> be fixed already).
>
> There is no reasonable purpose for busybox to be in Debian except for the
> boot-floppies, so there should be no problem. I'll package it up this
> afternoon then.
Actually, I was already using it in non-packaged format as the basis of
what I'm calling "Tiny Debian". It's a deb-based distro for resource
constrained PDAs and embedded systems. Having busybox separately packaged
will make it easier to manage the framework. I actually generate a
complete Debian-based image from any host Debian box for my Psion palmtop
(ARM7). The conflicts aren't a problem except when one decided to replace
busybox tar with GNU tar for enhanced functionality. For short term
usage it's not going to bother 99% of people, though.
--
Matt Porter
mmporter@home.com
This is Linux Country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.
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