Bug#1525: root disk missing ls?

[Bruce Perens <bruce@Pixar.com>]

I tried KISS a while back. It's a step in the right direction, but doesn't
have all of the programs I wanted, and wasn't as robust as I'd like it to be.
I then wrote something with the tiny utilities like KISS, but no shell.
It's intended to be linked into another small shell like "ash". I think
Ian has replaced "bash" on the root disk with "ash", because it was
Bourne-shell compatible and much smaller than "bash". The shell in KISS is
not useful for interpreting our scripts. All of these utilities
are supposed to run in a fork(), not in the main thread, for robustness.
These are the tools I have so far:

	cat chgrp chmod chown clear cp df false halt init ln mkdir
	mkswap more mount mv pwd reboot rm rmdir sleep swapoff swapon
	sync touch tput true umount update

I would like to add my own "tiny" versions of "ls", and "tar", and link
in the existing "gzip", "dialog", "badblocks", and the new fdisk rewrite.
I have the tar extractor function I wrote for "dpkg", and can easily make
a tar writer. To add "gzip", "dialog", "badblocks", and "fdisk", I will
modify the source packages for these programs so that they will create
library versions of themselves.

This should give us a reasonably small static-linked environment. It should
fit on the boot floppy along with the kernel and modules.

	Thanks

	Bruce