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Re: [MiNT] sources of oldstuff package

Hi,

On Wednesday 16 December 2009, Miro Kropacek wrote:
> I've noticed there are no sources for stuff in oldstuff package, i.e.
> source code of such essential tools like init, getty and so on.
> Basically, binary and src rpm are the same. There's package called
> mintinit and it does contain at least init but it seems it's totally
> different program and it's even marked as experimental.
>
> Does anybody know where to get sources for this package? Or everyone
> building the distro just took those binaries and didn't care that much?

Hm.  Has anybody tried getting Busybox working on MiNT?

Except for Perl it offers pretty full set of POSIX standard utilities:
	http://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox

and its build dependencies are AFAIK pretty minimal.

Because everything is linked to a single binary (and due to being strictly
size optimized), it could give quite a bit of disk usage savings on MiNT
lacking shared libs.

Memory usage on the other hand may be somewhat larger as binaries
aren't shared(?) in RAM, but one could e.g. provide couple of different sets
of Busybox utilities if that's a problem (say things that need sudo/suid and
things that don't).


For building GNU software it's not the best alternative because:
* many of the tools lack (at least some of) the extended GNU options (say,
  tar --format=gnu) and your builds may mysteriously fail because of this.
* several of the Busybox utilities don't give errors on unrecognized options
  (e.g. ps)
* if Busybox sources implement a certain feature, but it's not enabled
  in the Busybox configuration, only thing to check this is to check the
  sources.  The utilities themselves don't tell what features they don't
  implement in current BB configuration (see also above point)
   -> Best to configure BB tools with the most compatible features.
       Here's some more info on the BB feature GNU compatibility:
	http://wiki.maemo.org/Talk:Task:Busybox


	- Eero