Re: busybox

["K. Richard Pixley" <rich.pixley@access-company.com>]

Ben Finney wrote:

"K. Richard Pixley" <rich.pixley@access-company.com> writes:

  

If there a reason why busybox should not be packaged in such a way as
to provide a mutually exclusive alternative with the packages that it
supplants such as coreutils?
    

It doesn't supplant them. The busybox package installs exactly one
executable: '/usr/bin/busybox'.

It *can* supplant coreutils commands, if the existing commands are
overridden as a link to that binary; but that's not what happens when
installing 'busybox', so there's no necessary conflict.
  

Ok, sure.  But that seems like a hack to me so that busybox can be installed on regular desktop systems which presumably want coreutils, (and friends), to be installed as the primary "ls" command.  In this context, busybox is more of a toy, or an evaluation install than a useful tool.

For busybox to be a useful tool, it would need to supplant coreutils, (and friends).  And my question is to why this hasn't been done.  Certainly, a busybox-core package could install just the busybox binary and installing solely that package could result in the situation we have now.  But it would also be useful if there were a busybox-coreutils or perhaps just busybox-fat that would genuinely supplant all of the tools for which busybox can stand in.

--rich