blob: 126388155494a2ea10cbca9294b5b488fe62cdb4 [file] [log] [blame]
Rob Landley349ff522014-01-04 13:09:42 -06001<html><head><title>toybox news</title>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -06002<!--#include file="header.html" -->
3
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -05004<p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -05005into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast,
6reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into
Rob Landley49f8d6f2013-07-26 13:04:21 -05007a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p>
8
9<h2>News</h2>
Rob Landley08e18fb2014-04-20 14:22:19 -050010
Rob Landley8bae3142014-07-07 07:32:56 -050011<hr><b>July 7, 2014</b>
12<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
13most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
14solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
15concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd
16because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were
17unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
18
19<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.9.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.9</a> (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1385>commit 1385</a>) is out.</p>
20
21<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include:
22lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs,
23killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han,
24sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh,
25host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p>
26
27<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending):
28sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5,
29fallocate, and nbd-client.</p>
30
31<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps,
32bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd,
33login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's
34still more to do on all of those.)</p>
35
36<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against
37musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't
38support that target yet.)</p>
39
40<p><b>Documentation:</b></p>
41
42<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with
43a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the
44"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show
45stopper for incoming
46contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them
47during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes
48the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p>
49
50<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the
51full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p>
52
53<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is
54a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more
55elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option
56parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p>
57
58<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p>
59
60<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default
61output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported
62bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init()
63was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound)
64had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be
65there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at
66the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test
67in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return
68success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and
69ferror() from xprintf().</p>
70
71<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff
72implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some
73diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from
74a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops
75at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set,
76which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of
77chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p>
78
79<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final
80build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of
81libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p>
82
83<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes,
84so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities.
85So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the
86setup code to setlocale().</p>
87
88<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p>
89
90<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it
91to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also
92added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database
93parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p>
94
95<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making
96it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum
97for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other
98implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p>
99
100<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname),
101the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get
102a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p>
103
104<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP
105command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p>
106
107<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always
108build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p>
109
110<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so
111we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0
112filename" actually works again.</p>
113
114<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd,
115and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill,
116groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still
117working to fix them.</p>
118
119<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a
120dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new
121generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte
122to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's
123initialized to in toy_init).</p>
124
125<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and
126use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro
127contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs
128decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion
129bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you
130cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the
131first one, the build break is now more informative).</p>
132
Rob Landley08e18fb2014-04-20 14:22:19 -0500133<hr><b>April 20, 2014</b>
134<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
135which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
136had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
137far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
138turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
139
140<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
141<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
142about time too.</p>
143
144<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
145that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
146from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
147There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
148
149<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
150way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
151<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
152Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
153
154<p><b>In pending:</b>
155Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
156groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
157ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
158Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
159I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
160compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
161and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
162
163<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
164cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
165in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
166work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
167documented what their output actually meant).</p>
168
169<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
170handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
171fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
172options (all commands, html output).
173Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
174set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
175compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
176sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
177Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
178to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
179allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
180tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
181that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
182Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
183pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
184find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
185the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
186now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
187aliasing.</p>
188
189<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
190can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
191.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
192bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
193i
194<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
195not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
196was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
197configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
198
199<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
200build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
201the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
202
203<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
204xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
205and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
206get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
207xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
208bzcat.c.</p>
209
210<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
211help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
212The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
213#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
214<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
215of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
216good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
217at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
218
Rob Landley78663502013-11-19 09:44:48 -0600219<hr><b>November 18, 2013</b>
220<blockquote><p>"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -
221The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
222
Rob Landley4d886d62014-03-08 19:26:33 -0600223<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on
Rob Landley78663502013-11-19 09:44:48 -0600224<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
225
226<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
227reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
228pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
229cleanup.</p>
230
231<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
232into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
233dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
234an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
235
236<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
237added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
238William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
239(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
240where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
241I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
242the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
243synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
244$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
245a typo in the web page.</p>
246
247<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
248bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
249--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
250querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
251debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
252The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
253micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
254now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
255
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500256<hr><b>September 17, 2013</b>
257<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
258Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
259station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
260and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
261</blockquote>
262
263<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
264<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
265
266<p>This release adds
267several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
268submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
269a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
270acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
271
272<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
273The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
274instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
275Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
276other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
277heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
278namespace support.</p>
279
280<h3>Pending</h3>
281
282<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
283probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
284dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
Rob Landleyd2774142013-10-04 14:32:39 -0500285Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500286syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
287test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
288M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
289
290<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
291ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
292and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
293logger and syslogd...</p>
294
295<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
296but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
297expand, and touch.</p>
298
299<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
300
301<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
302multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
303OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
304command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
305you're curious, you can do:</p>
306
307<blockquote><pre>
308make defconfig
309make
310mkdir singles
311for i in $(./toybox)
312do
313 echo $i
314 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
315done
316</pre>
317<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
318</blockquote>
319
320<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
321time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
322
323<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
324not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
325functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
326This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
327
328<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
329logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
330should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
331option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
332--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
333
334<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
335does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
336for us".</p>
337
338<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
339It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
340so much anymore.</p>
341
342<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
343linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
344using it now.</p>
345
346<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
347(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
348that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
349into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
350"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
351
352<h3>Bugfixes</h3>
353
354<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
355finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
356someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
357Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
358
359<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
360python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
361for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
362then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
363
364<p>Ashwini Sharma
365pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
366configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
367
368<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
369a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p>
370
371<p>The new function xexec_optargs()
372replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
373during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
374
375<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
376didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
377between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
378command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
379
380<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
381delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
382should now be fixed.</p>
383
384<p>
Rob Landley49f8d6f2013-07-26 13:04:21 -0500385<hr><b>July 26, 2013</b>
386<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
387mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
388mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
389against it and post them to the list.</p>
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500390
Isaac Dunhamc810f9f2013-07-06 11:26:15 -0500391<hr><b>July 2, 2013</b>
392<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
393should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
394like you." -
395The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
396
397<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
398<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
399uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
400default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
401enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
402Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
403</p>
404
405<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
406each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
407and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
408
409<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
410logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
411Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
412(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
413
414<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
415more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
416<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
417of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
418
419<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
420condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
421-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
422Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
423and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
424corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
425Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
426fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
427field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
428to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
429moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
430stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
431last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
432(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
433</p>
434
435<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
436variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
437debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
438that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
439just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
440against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
441for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
442various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
443(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
444
445<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
446system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
447release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
448Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
449</p>
450
451<p><b>LICENSE TWEAK</b>: After <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-March/000794.html>discussion</a> on the mailing list the "2 clause
452BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
453paragraph now says:</p>
454
455<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
456software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
457
458<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
459permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
460copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
461that consider BSD and GPL compatible have <a href=https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/crypto/aes_generic.c>files with
462both license notices</a> on them (sometimes at <a href=http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/shell/ash.c>opposite ends of the file</a> to make the conflict
463less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
464the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
465
466<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
467or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
468BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
469
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500470<hr><b>March 21, 2013</b>
471<p>Video of my ELC talk
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500472"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500473is up on youtube. Related materials include the
474<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
475<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
476
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500477<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
478the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
479
480<ul>
481<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
482 <ul>
483 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
484 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
485 </ul>
486<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
487 <ul>
488 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
489 </ul>
490<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
491<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
492<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
493 <ul>
494 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
495 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
496 <ul>
497 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
498 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
499 </ul>
500 </ul>
501</ul>
502</span>
503
504
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500505<hr><b>March 14, 2013</b>
506<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
507The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
508
509<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
510<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
511the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
512
513<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
514getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
515"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
516instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
517Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
518can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
519
520<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
521Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
522Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
523should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
524
525<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
526(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
527
Rob Landley9a69a922013-02-23 18:32:08 -0600528<hr><b>January 18, 2013</b>
529<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
530
531<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
532<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
533are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
534<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
535
536<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
537and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
538kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
539Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
540
541<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
542readlink commands. The segfault in ls
543happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
544default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
545extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
546a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
547code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
548suite checks for it).</p>
549
550<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
551error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
552still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
553bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
554means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
555error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
556Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
557doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
558at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
559(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
560dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
561functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
562libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
563it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
564
565<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
566disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
567to -Os by default now.</p>
568
Rob Landley8390c652012-12-19 09:16:45 -0600569<hr><b>December 15, 2012</b>
570<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
571thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
572go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
573</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
574
575<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
576<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
577just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
578Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
579a new stable version.</p>
580
581<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
582(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
583bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
584support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
585Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
586The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
587-fenq.</p>
588
589<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
590and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
591features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
592
593<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
594level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
595than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
596or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
597earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
598the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
599(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
600
601<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
602Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
603full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
604stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
605it).</p>
606
607<p>The open group broke their website so the
608<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
609now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
610pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
611I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
612
613<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
614because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
615implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
616to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
617but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
618filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
619
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600620<hr><b>November 13, 2012</b>
621<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
622- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
623
624<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
625<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
626
627<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
628Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
629md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
630unix2dos).</p>
631
632<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
633default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
634Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
635
636<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
637"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
638the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
639and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
640An android directory is planned (see the updated
641<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
642
643<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
644global block are now automatically generated, commands should
645#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
646command.</p>
647
648<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
649in them, such as switch_root.</p>
650
651<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
652uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
653The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
654properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
655fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
656calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
657and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
658break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
659properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
660fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
661fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
662on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
663on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
664a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
665partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
666this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
667wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
668some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
669successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
670versions was added to portability.h.</p>
671
672<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
673rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
674the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
675document, where applicable.</p>
676
677<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
678a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
679
680<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
681back now.</p>
682</span>
683
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500684<hr><b>July 23, 2012</b>
685<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
686out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
687out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
688
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600689<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
690<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500691
692<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
693the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
694
695<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
696taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
697contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
698case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
699
700<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
701<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
702<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
703to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
704fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
705corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
706glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
707pending output on exit.</p>
708
Rob Landleyb1cc1d12012-06-25 06:42:24 -0500709<hr><b>June 25, 2012</b>
710<blockquote><p>"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
711
712<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
713<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
714mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
715x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
716now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
717suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
718musl libc.</p>
719
720<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
721it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
722pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
723</span>
724
725<hr><b>June 12, 2012</b>
726<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
727he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
728wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
729muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
730always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
731the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
732
733<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
734so here it is, based
735on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
736statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
737actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
738that).</p>
739
740<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
741doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
742The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
743threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
744more frequent from here on.</p>
745
746<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
747tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
748which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
749
750<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
751chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
752you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
753on slackware.</p>
754
755<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
756mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
757vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
758Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
759
760<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
761wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
762deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
763musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
764some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
765
766<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
767to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
768problematic).</p>
769
770<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
771yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
772SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
773multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
774segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
775posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
776release.)</p>
777
778<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
779for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
780is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
781
782<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
783Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
784'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
785(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
786yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
7871.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
788
789
Rob Landleyed6ed622012-03-06 20:49:03 -0600790<hr><b>March 3, 2012</b>
791
792<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
793without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
794Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
795for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p>
796</p></blockquote>
797
798<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
799on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This
800time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
801binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
802
803<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
804have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
805
806<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
807insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
808realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel
809Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
810for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
811Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
812cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
813
814<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
815code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
816code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
817bloat-o-meter.)</p>
818
819<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
820Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
821more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
822Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
823optimizations.</p>
824
825<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
826dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
827and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
828
Rob Landleye258af32008-01-05 18:09:49 -0600829
Rob Landleyd11ac702012-02-13 21:16:03 -0600830<hr><b>February 12, 2012</b>
831<blockquote><p>
832"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
833least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
834important respects..."</p>
835<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
836
837<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
838<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
839point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably
840ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
841finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
842patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
843
844<p>More to come...</p>
845
Rob Landleyce8a2672012-02-02 07:27:05 -0600846<hr>
847<p><b>November 15, 2011</b> - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
848clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
849implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
850
851<p>More to come...</p>
852
853<hr>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600854
Rob Landleyaba51702012-08-26 16:33:06 -0500855<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600856
857<!--#include file="footer.html" -->