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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
11<hr><b>April 20, 2014</b>
12<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
13which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
14had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
15far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
16turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
17
18<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
19<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
20about time too.</p>
21
22<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
23that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
24from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
25There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
26
27<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
28way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
29<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
30Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
31
32<p><b>In pending:</b>
33Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
34groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
35ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
36Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
37I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
38compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
39and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
40
41<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
42cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
43in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
44work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
45documented what their output actually meant).</p>
46
47<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
48handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
49fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
50options (all commands, html output).
51Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
52set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
53compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
54sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
55Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
56to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
57allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
58tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
59that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
60Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
61pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
62find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
63the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
64now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
65aliasing.</p>
66
67<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
68can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
69.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
70bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
71i
72<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
73not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
74was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
75configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
76
77<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
78build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
79the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
80
81<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
82xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
83and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
84get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
85xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
86bzcat.c.</p>
87
88<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
89help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
90The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
91#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
92<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
93of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
94good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
95at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
96
Rob Landley78663502013-11-19 09:44:48 -060097<hr><b>November 18, 2013</b>
98<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." -
99The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
100
Rob Landley4d886d62014-03-08 19:26:33 -0600101<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 -0600102<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
103
104<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
105reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
106pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
107cleanup.</p>
108
109<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
110into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
111dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
112an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
113
114<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
115added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
116William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
117(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
118where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
119I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
120the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
121synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
122$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
123a typo in the web page.</p>
124
125<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
126bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
127--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
128querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
129debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
130The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
131micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
132now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
133
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500134<hr><b>September 17, 2013</b>
135<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
136Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
137station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
138and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
139</blockquote>
140
141<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
142<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
143
144<p>This release adds
145several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
146submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
147a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
148acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
149
150<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
151The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
152instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
153Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
154other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
155heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
156namespace support.</p>
157
158<h3>Pending</h3>
159
160<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
161probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
162dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
Rob Landleyd2774142013-10-04 14:32:39 -0500163Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500164syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
165test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
166M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
167
168<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
169ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
170and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
171logger and syslogd...</p>
172
173<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
174but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
175expand, and touch.</p>
176
177<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
178
179<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
180multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
181OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
182command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
183you're curious, you can do:</p>
184
185<blockquote><pre>
186make defconfig
187make
188mkdir singles
189for i in $(./toybox)
190do
191 echo $i
192 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
193done
194</pre>
195<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
196</blockquote>
197
198<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
199time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
200
201<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
202not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
203functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
204This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
205
206<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
207logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
208should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
209option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
210--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
211
212<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
213does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
214for us".</p>
215
216<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
217It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
218so much anymore.</p>
219
220<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
221linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
222using it now.</p>
223
224<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
225(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
226that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
227into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
228"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
229
230<h3>Bugfixes</h3>
231
232<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
233finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
234someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
235Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
236
237<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
238python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
239for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
240then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
241
242<p>Ashwini Sharma
243pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
244configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
245
246<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
247a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p>
248
249<p>The new function xexec_optargs()
250replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
251during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
252
253<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
254didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
255between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
256command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
257
258<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
259delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
260should now be fixed.</p>
261
262<p>
Rob Landley49f8d6f2013-07-26 13:04:21 -0500263<hr><b>July 26, 2013</b>
264<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
265mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
266mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
267against it and post them to the list.</p>
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500268
Isaac Dunhamc810f9f2013-07-06 11:26:15 -0500269<hr><b>July 2, 2013</b>
270<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
271should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
272like you." -
273The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
274
275<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
276<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
277uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
278default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
279enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
280Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
281</p>
282
283<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
284each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
285and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
286
287<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
288logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
289Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
290(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
291
292<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
293more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
294<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
295of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
296
297<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
298condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
299-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
300Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
301and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
302corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
303Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
304fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
305field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
306to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
307moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
308stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
309last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
310(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
311</p>
312
313<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
314variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
315debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
316that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
317just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
318against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
319for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
320various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
321(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
322
323<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
324system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
325release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
326Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
327</p>
328
329<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
330BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
331paragraph now says:</p>
332
333<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
334software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
335
336<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
337permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
338copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
339that 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
340both 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
341less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
342the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
343
344<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
345or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
346BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
347
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500348<hr><b>March 21, 2013</b>
349<p>Video of my ELC talk
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500350"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500351is up on youtube. Related materials include the
352<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
353<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
354
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500355<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
356the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
357
358<ul>
359<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
360 <ul>
361 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
362 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
363 </ul>
364<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
365 <ul>
366 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
367 </ul>
368<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
369<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
370<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
371 <ul>
372 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
373 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
374 <ul>
375 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
376 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
377 </ul>
378 </ul>
379</ul>
380</span>
381
382
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500383<hr><b>March 14, 2013</b>
384<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
385The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
386
387<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
388<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
389the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
390
391<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
392getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
393"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
394instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
395Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
396can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
397
398<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
399Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
400Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
401should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
402
403<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
404(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
405
Rob Landley9a69a922013-02-23 18:32:08 -0600406<hr><b>January 18, 2013</b>
407<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
408
409<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
410<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
411are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
412<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
413
414<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
415and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
416kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
417Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
418
419<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
420readlink commands. The segfault in ls
421happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
422default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
423extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
424a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
425code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
426suite checks for it).</p>
427
428<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
429error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
430still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
431bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
432means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
433error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
434Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
435doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
436at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
437(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
438dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
439functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
440libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
441it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
442
443<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
444disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
445to -Os by default now.</p>
446
Rob Landley8390c652012-12-19 09:16:45 -0600447<hr><b>December 15, 2012</b>
448<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
449thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
450go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
451</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
452
453<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
454<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
455just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
456Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
457a new stable version.</p>
458
459<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
460(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
461bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
462support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
463Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
464The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
465-fenq.</p>
466
467<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
468and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
469features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
470
471<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
472level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
473than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
474or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
475earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
476the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
477(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
478
479<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
480Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
481full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
482stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
483it).</p>
484
485<p>The open group broke their website so the
486<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
487now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
488pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
489I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
490
491<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
492because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
493implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
494to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
495but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
496filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
497
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600498<hr><b>November 13, 2012</b>
499<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
500- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
501
502<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
503<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
504
505<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
506Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
507md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
508unix2dos).</p>
509
510<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
511default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
512Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
513
514<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
515"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
516the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
517and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
518An android directory is planned (see the updated
519<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
520
521<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
522global block are now automatically generated, commands should
523#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
524command.</p>
525
526<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
527in them, such as switch_root.</p>
528
529<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
530uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
531The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
532properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
533fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
534calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
535and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
536break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
537properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
538fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
539fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
540on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
541on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
542a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
543partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
544this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
545wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
546some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
547successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
548versions was added to portability.h.</p>
549
550<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
551rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
552the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
553document, where applicable.</p>
554
555<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
556a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
557
558<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
559back now.</p>
560</span>
561
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500562<hr><b>July 23, 2012</b>
563<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
564out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
565out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
566
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600567<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
568<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500569
570<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
571the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
572
573<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
574taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
575contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
576case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
577
578<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
579<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
580<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
581to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
582fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
583corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
584glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
585pending output on exit.</p>
586
Rob Landleyb1cc1d12012-06-25 06:42:24 -0500587<hr><b>June 25, 2012</b>
588<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>
589
590<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
591<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
592mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
593x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
594now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
595suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
596musl libc.</p>
597
598<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
599it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
600pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
601</span>
602
603<hr><b>June 12, 2012</b>
604<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
605he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
606wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
607muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
608always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
609the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
610
611<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
612so here it is, based
613on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
614statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
615actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
616that).</p>
617
618<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
619doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
620The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
621threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
622more frequent from here on.</p>
623
624<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
625tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
626which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
627
628<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
629chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
630you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
631on slackware.</p>
632
633<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
634mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
635vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
636Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
637
638<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
639wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
640deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
641musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
642some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
643
644<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
645to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
646problematic).</p>
647
648<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
649yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
650SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
651multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
652segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
653posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
654release.)</p>
655
656<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
657for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
658is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
659
660<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
661Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
662'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
663(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
664yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
6651.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
666
667
Rob Landleyed6ed622012-03-06 20:49:03 -0600668<hr><b>March 3, 2012</b>
669
670<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
671without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
672Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
673for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p>
674</p></blockquote>
675
676<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
677on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This
678time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
679binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
680
681<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
682have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
683
684<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
685insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
686realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel
687Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
688for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
689Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
690cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
691
692<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
693code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
694code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
695bloat-o-meter.)</p>
696
697<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
698Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
699more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
700Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
701optimizations.</p>
702
703<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
704dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
705and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
706
Rob Landleye258af32008-01-05 18:09:49 -0600707
Rob Landleyd11ac702012-02-13 21:16:03 -0600708<hr><b>February 12, 2012</b>
709<blockquote><p>
710"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
711least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
712important respects..."</p>
713<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
714
715<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
716<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
717point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably
718ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
719finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
720patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
721
722<p>More to come...</p>
723
Rob Landleyce8a2672012-02-02 07:27:05 -0600724<hr>
725<p><b>November 15, 2011</b> - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
726clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
727implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
728
729<p>More to come...</p>
730
731<hr>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600732
Rob Landleyaba51702012-08-26 16:33:06 -0500733<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600734
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