Bug#1009309: udhcpc: allow usage without busybox
13.04.2022 09:31, Helmut Grohne wrote:
Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 09:13:58AM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
No, as far as I understand. B/c udhcpc package lacks the main binary
if there's no busybox... ;)
Can you explain please? :)
Head -> table. I now understand why udhcpc is so small. Thank you for
your kind reply. There is nothing to change here. I'll look into the
reverse (and usual) solution to space saving: replace everything else
with busybox.
That was good Helmut! Thank you!
On a related note, I have been wondering whether we could somehow put
the integration of busybox on more solid footing. A possible route could
be adding tiny symlink packages e.g. iproute2-minimal containing ip,
kmod-minimal containing lsmod and friends or procps-minimal containing
top et al. These would have to conflict with iproute2, kmod and procps
respectively as they're sharing paths. To make that actually useful,
downstream packages could update their depends to foo | foo-minimal when
they are known to work with busybox. If toybox wants to join, -minimal
would refer to the minimal baselines provided by both busybox and
toybox. It's a lot of small packages and metadata though. I'm not
convinced yet and merely sharing thoughts. Properly minimizing Debian
chroots with busybox is not a "it just works" experience yet.
I thought about this back when I stepped on as busybox maintainer a few
years back. Busybox isn't really suitable as a full-blown implementation
for many system utilities. For one, quite some things on the system will
break when you replace something with busybox, due to maintscripts, or
startup scripts, whatever, usage of options/features/lack-of-bugs of the
busybox's large brothers. Eg, file^Wcoreutils or [mg]awk provides much
more features than busybox counterparts, and these features are being
used in debian. This isn't difficult to fix in most places but you
know the drill with cross-compile, how slow this process is :)
But busybox is basically not maintained in Debian. I tried to at least
reduce the number of active bug reports (there were many of them),
updated version to current one (previous update was a few versions
behind), tried to sync different configuration with each other and
with reality.. until something happened a few debian releases ago
and I was pissed off and stepped down. I don't even remember what
happened, just a vague memory of someone uploading busybox backing
up changes I did and refusing my changes to go, or some such.. So
after that, busybox basically froze again. I still maintain it
locally for our needs just like I did before, but I don't do that
in Debian anymore. Maybe I should try again...
/mjt
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