On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:42:22 +1100 "Trent W. Buck" <twb@cybersource.com.au> wrote: > > That is not advisable. busybox in Grip has nothing to do with > > busybox for Crush and it is NOT advisable to activate ANY of the > > busybox applets on an Emdebian Grip system for precisely the same > > reasons as you would not do the same on a Debian system. The > > package description for Debian busybox warns that busybox should not > > be used in this way. > > I don't know anything about Crush; I didn't realize I wasn't supposed > to use busybox on normal Debian systems. I see you're right, the > busybox package description tells me not to (although it doesn't say > WHY not...) The reason is that the Debian build of busybox uses a highly customised busybox configuration which is not aimed at a fully installed Debian system, further, it is not under the control of anyone working on fully installed Debian systems and could therefore change without notice. The clue is that the maintainer for busybox is the Debian-Installer team. Anything from d-i is unlikely to be compatible with use after the first boot, other than in similarly specialised areas like initramfs-tools. As the package configuration does not support the "typical" usage of busybox as a replacement for packages like coreutils, none of the packages potentially replaceable by busybox understand that busybox can be used instead and therefore every package affected will simply stamp all over the busybox settings, causing installation breakages, duplicate binaries and path problems. In addition, none of the maintainer scripts used by the other 20,000 packages in Debian have any compatibility with the reduced instruction set of the busybox applet replacements. Therefore, not only will you get problems with the packages directly replaced by busybox, you will get package installation/removal failures from hundreds of other packages because a particular option to grep or whatever is not supported by busybox, busybox exits non-zero and the installation halts. To use busybox as busybox in Debian means patching a few hundred packages to understand what busybox can and cannot do. There is a reason that busybox is smaller than the alternatives - it does less. Unfortunately, Debian expects every option to work precisely as it would from coreutils and it is unreasonable to expect busybox to support everything. This is one of the problems inherent in Crush and it requires lots of packages to be patched and rebuilt. This is impossible for Grip. Feel free to add a page to the Wiki about this issue. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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