woody: shells and libraries, libbusybox?
Im a bit hazzy about the role and requirements of a shell in the
installer.
My understanding is that shell commands may be needed by some core
components,
udpkg calls ar, tar, gz (and rm if my patch gets reversed), and also
needs to be able to handle postinsts.
Postinst area bit of a grey area to me, is it defined anywhere what
shell commands they can use ?
Perhaps for udebs we could define a subset of shell commands that can be
used in a postinst, then we know what we are working with.
tasq says udebconf needs a shell, what specifically ?
The net fetcher could be done pretty cheaply with busybox's wget.
The shell is also good for emergencies, but this in itself isnt enough
of a reason to consider it to be core i dont think.
So.... how about make busybox into a shared library, that way core
components could link against libbusybox to access some commands as
functions rather than via the shell, and also shell commands could be
provided by a skeleton busybox that links to libbusybox.
Would make it a bit more flexible, what are the drawbacks ?
Glenn
Reply to: