Re: Bug#553329: Allow busybox wget instead of wget?
On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 07:14:39AM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> 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.
Understood. My intention for my ad-hoc squeeze/grip system was to
have busybox symlinks only as fallbacks in a directory that was always
last in $PATH.
Because busybox didn't Provides: arping, the "dumbed down" busybox
arping would be around for sysadmins, but if another Debian package
needed the "real" arping, it'd have Depends: arping. That would mean
that the real arping would get installed and placed in a higher
priority path than the busybox symlink, so while the real arping was
installed, it would be used automatically.
Actually, the initial reason I started thinking about this was because
I didn't have vi installed, and vipw tried to run vi instead of using
sensible-editor, and it failed because I didn't have vi installed.
I thought "I don't want other sysadmins to waste space on this device
by installing vim. I will trick them by creating a symlink to
busybox's vi, which will be suffice for emergency editing." From
there it was a small step to thinking about doing this for other
busybox applets, so e.g. bzip2 so tar -j would magically work.
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