Re: busybox replacement idea

[tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 11:37:48AM -0500, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
>[...] 
> We should be able to just copy the existing simple and short src/rescue/ 
> infrastructure to create the more complete replacement. Then we should 
> allow building this for a non-NetBSD target system. Any suggestions or 
> examples on how to build rescue for a non-NetBSD target system?
> 
> We may not be as small, but three benefits may be 1) user friendly 
> commands; 2) nice license for proprietary use (There have been 
> license violations reported for busybox); and 3) nice promotion of 
> NetBSD.
> 
> Any thoughts on this?

This is related, but more of an use case.

I'm developing kerTeX (http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html), a TeX and
al. distribution for... everybody, since it is pure C89, BSD like
licence, and a _kernel_ that is a TeX system with all the core (D.E.K.'s
softwares + some essential utilities or fonts), and the ability to add
kerTeX packages at will, kerTeX dealing with its own packages (thus
relieving every host system from dealing with anything TeX related
except the hosted kerTeX by itself).

My compilation/distribution framework (R.I.S.K.) deals without problem
with systems having POSIX.2 utilities (almost all the Unices flavours, 
Plan9 with APE, Mac OSX). If, for the various Windows versions,
cross-compilation could be achieved, and running the programs will work
(one exception: MetaPost uses some simple sh(1) scripts, that need
to be "batch"ed) could be done, the packaging framework uses a
subset of POSIX.2 utilities (sh(1), ed(1), sed(1), tar(1)...).

The simplest would be that these utilities be compiled for a host system
that does not provide them. On Windows, such an environment is
given by S.F.U.  (but not for every system), by Cygwin (but overkill),
and Mingw (but lack at least ed(1) that I do not want to drop).

I had already contemplated taking NetBSD sources and using crunchgen(8)
for this, thus leading to a POSIX.2 limited environment on whatever 
system. (Note: I use NetBSD and Plan9 and not Windows... So this is for
"others".)

Just to say that this could be useful also to provide this for non POSIX
systems, but letting compilers, assemblers and linkers be the host ones
(speaking about Windows, Microsoft does publish a compiler framework
that a Windows user can download; so the Unix/POSIX way of dealing with
sources could be used with the utilities and the native compiler
framework).

So this could be of a wider use than "only" Busybox like replacement.

FWIW,
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
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