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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
Rob Landley774c5992014-12-30 14:49:02 -060011<hr><b>December 30, 2014</b>
12<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a>
13<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman
14work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at
15<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar
16on the left.</p>
17
18<p>You still subscribe to the list through
19<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p>
20
Rob Landleydc5bd762014-11-28 16:53:59 -060021<hr><b>November 19, 2014</b>
22
23<blockquote><p>"This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
24
25<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a>
26(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p>
27
28<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands,
29but they're all in pending.</p>
30
31<h3>Development</h3>
32
33<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although
34it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of
35Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we
36don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch.
37(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of
38implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's
39still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now.
40Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04?
41Yeah...)</p>
42
43<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to
44make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands
45to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p>
46
47<blockquote><p>
48wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*,
49less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join,
50nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand,
51users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk
52</p></blockquote>
53
54<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p>
55
56<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan).
57Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing,
58and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending.
59Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d
60was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it
61should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too.
62Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an
63unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p>
64
65<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and
66ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a
67pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod,
68losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by
69static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the
70TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini
71also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link
72creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p>
73
74<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal
75function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p>
76
77<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each
78line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create
79a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business,
80but the output is tidier now.)</p>
81
82<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
83
84<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile
85probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that
86use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic,
87but in theory it's possible now.</p>
88
89<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications
90if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail
91to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p>
92
93<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop
94function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must
95close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p>
96
97<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into
98a new unescape() function.</p>
99
Rob Landley037009f2014-10-02 07:53:27 -0500100<hr><b>October 2, 2014</b>
101<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
102The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss...
103Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the
104difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote>
105
106<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a>
107(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p>
108
109<h3>New commands</h3>
110
111<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands
112(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p>
113
114<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now
115ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth
116instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving
117looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to
118cut, touch, free, and id.</p>
119
120<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini
121Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded
122fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code.
123Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p>
124
125<h3>Build infrastructure</h3>
126
127<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p>
128
129<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of
130processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.)
131Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain
132about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now
133gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p>
134
135<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p>
136
137<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to
138build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file
139selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro
140for the command. It enables each command's
141sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build
142full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when
143the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro
144now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY
145without the NEWTOY</p>
146
147<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that
148aren't building standalone yet are:</p>
149
150<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos,
151whoami</p></blockquote>
152
153<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY()
154entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries
155that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure
156is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command
157is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the
158code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible
159to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting
160design goals in the two contexts.)</p>
161
162<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual
163commands.
164
165<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p>
166
167<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh
168containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current
169configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an
170exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite
171got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p>
172
173<h3>Internals</h3>
174
175<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking
176filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now
177done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added
178to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now
179requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false).
180Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various
181pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can
182use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode.
183Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether
184we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p>
185
186<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges
187(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root).
188The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the
189command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled),
190toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse
191internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth),
192always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when
193we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes,
194dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in
195error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an
196option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments
197saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched
198off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio.
199Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall
200with no arguments (segfaulted).</p>
201
202<p><b>Portability</b></p>
203
204<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx
205to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl
206maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed
207instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section
208to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your
209build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do
210a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make
211it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns
212requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch
213to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current
214musl source control.)</p>
215
216<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have
217another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p>
218
219<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p>
220
221<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small
222allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing
223"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic
224is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux
225filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters
226we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd),
227newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in
228filesystem).</p>
229
230<h3>Documentation</h3>
231
232<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html
233documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently
234(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p>
235
236<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup
237before the pending directory was added.</p>
238
239<h3>Test Suite</h3>
240
241<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the
242testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p>
243
244<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to
245stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu
246sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p>
247
248<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat,
249and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p>
250
Rob Landley8bae3142014-07-07 07:32:56 -0500251<hr><b>July 7, 2014</b>
252<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
253most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
254solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
255concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd
256because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were
257unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
258
259<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>
260
261<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include:
262lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs,
263killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han,
264sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh,
265host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p>
266
267<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending):
268sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5,
269fallocate, and nbd-client.</p>
270
271<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps,
272bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd,
273login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's
274still more to do on all of those.)</p>
275
276<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against
277musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't
278support that target yet.)</p>
279
280<p><b>Documentation:</b></p>
281
282<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with
283a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the
284"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show
285stopper for incoming
286contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them
287during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes
288the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p>
289
290<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the
291full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p>
292
293<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is
294a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more
295elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option
296parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p>
297
298<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p>
299
300<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default
301output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported
302bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init()
303was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound)
304had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be
305there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at
306the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test
307in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return
308success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and
309ferror() from xprintf().</p>
310
311<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff
312implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some
313diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from
314a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops
315at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set,
316which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of
317chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p>
318
319<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final
320build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of
321libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p>
322
323<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes,
324so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities.
325So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the
326setup code to setlocale().</p>
327
328<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p>
329
330<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it
331to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also
332added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database
333parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p>
334
335<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making
336it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum
337for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other
338implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p>
339
340<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname),
341the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get
342a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p>
343
344<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP
345command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p>
346
347<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always
348build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p>
349
350<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so
351we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0
352filename" actually works again.</p>
353
354<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd,
355and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill,
356groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still
357working to fix them.</p>
358
359<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a
360dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new
361generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte
362to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's
363initialized to in toy_init).</p>
364
365<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and
366use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro
367contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs
368decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion
369bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you
370cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the
371first one, the build break is now more informative).</p>
372
Rob Landley08e18fb2014-04-20 14:22:19 -0500373<hr><b>April 20, 2014</b>
374<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
375which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
376had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
377far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
378turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
379
380<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
381<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
382about time too.</p>
383
384<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
385that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
386from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
387There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
388
389<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
390way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
391<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
392Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
393
394<p><b>In pending:</b>
395Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
396groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
397ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
398Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
399I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
400compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
401and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
402
403<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
404cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
405in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
406work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
407documented what their output actually meant).</p>
408
409<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
410handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
411fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
412options (all commands, html output).
413Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
414set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
415compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
416sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
417Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
418to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
419allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
420tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
421that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
422Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
423pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
424find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
425the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
426now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
427aliasing.</p>
428
429<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
430can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
431.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
432bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
433i
434<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
435not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
436was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
437configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
438
439<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
440build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
441the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
442
443<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
444xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
445and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
446get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
447xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
448bzcat.c.</p>
449
450<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
451help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
452The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
453#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
454<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
455of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
456good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
457at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
458
Rob Landley78663502013-11-19 09:44:48 -0600459<hr><b>November 18, 2013</b>
460<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." -
461The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
462
Rob Landley4d886d62014-03-08 19:26:33 -0600463<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 -0600464<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
465
466<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
467reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
468pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
469cleanup.</p>
470
471<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
472into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
473dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
474an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
475
476<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
477added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
478William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
479(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
480where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
481I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
482the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
483synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
484$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
485a typo in the web page.</p>
486
487<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
488bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
489--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
490querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
491debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
492The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
493micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
494now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
495
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500496<hr><b>September 17, 2013</b>
497<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
498Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
499station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
500and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
501</blockquote>
502
503<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
504<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
505
506<p>This release adds
507several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
508submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
509a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
510acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
511
512<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
513The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
514instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
515Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
516other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
517heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
518namespace support.</p>
519
520<h3>Pending</h3>
521
522<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
523probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
524dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
Rob Landleyd2774142013-10-04 14:32:39 -0500525Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500526syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
527test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
528M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
529
530<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
531ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
532and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
533logger and syslogd...</p>
534
535<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
536but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
537expand, and touch.</p>
538
539<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
540
541<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
542multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
543OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
544command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
545you're curious, you can do:</p>
546
547<blockquote><pre>
548make defconfig
549make
550mkdir singles
551for i in $(./toybox)
552do
553 echo $i
554 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
555done
556</pre>
557<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
558</blockquote>
559
560<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
561time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
562
563<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
564not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
565functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
566This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
567
568<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
569logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
570should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
571option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
572--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
573
574<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
575does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
576for us".</p>
577
578<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
579It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
580so much anymore.</p>
581
582<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
583linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
584using it now.</p>
585
586<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
587(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
588that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
589into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
590"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
591
592<h3>Bugfixes</h3>
593
594<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
595finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
596someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
597Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
598
599<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
600python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
601for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
602then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
603
604<p>Ashwini Sharma
605pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
606configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
607
608<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
609a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p>
610
611<p>The new function xexec_optargs()
612replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
613during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
614
615<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
616didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
617between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
618command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
619
620<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
621delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
622should now be fixed.</p>
623
624<p>
Rob Landley49f8d6f2013-07-26 13:04:21 -0500625<hr><b>July 26, 2013</b>
626<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
627mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
628mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
629against it and post them to the list.</p>
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500630
Isaac Dunhamc810f9f2013-07-06 11:26:15 -0500631<hr><b>July 2, 2013</b>
632<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
633should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
634like you." -
635The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
636
637<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
638<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
639uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
640default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
641enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
642Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
643</p>
644
645<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
646each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
647and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
648
649<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
650logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
651Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
652(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
653
654<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
655more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
656<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
657of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
658
659<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
660condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
661-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
662Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
663and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
664corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
665Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
666fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
667field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
668to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
669moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
670stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
671last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
672(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
673</p>
674
675<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
676variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
677debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
678that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
679just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
680against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
681for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
682various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
683(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
684
685<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
686system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
687release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
688Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
689</p>
690
691<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
692BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
693paragraph now says:</p>
694
695<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
696software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
697
698<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
699permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
700copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
701that 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
702both 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
703less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
704the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
705
706<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
707or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
708BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
709
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500710<hr><b>March 21, 2013</b>
711<p>Video of my ELC talk
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500712"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500713is up on youtube. Related materials include the
714<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
715<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
716
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500717<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
718the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
719
720<ul>
721<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
722 <ul>
723 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
724 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
725 </ul>
726<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
727 <ul>
728 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
729 </ul>
730<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
731<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
732<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
733 <ul>
734 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
735 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
736 <ul>
737 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
738 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
739 </ul>
740 </ul>
741</ul>
742</span>
743
744
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500745<hr><b>March 14, 2013</b>
746<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
747The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
748
749<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
750<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
751the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
752
753<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
754getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
755"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
756instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
757Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
758can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
759
760<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
761Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
762Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
763should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
764
765<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
766(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
767
Rob Landley9a69a922013-02-23 18:32:08 -0600768<hr><b>January 18, 2013</b>
769<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
770
771<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
772<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
773are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
774<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
775
776<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
777and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
778kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
779Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
780
781<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
782readlink commands. The segfault in ls
783happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
784default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
785extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
786a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
787code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
788suite checks for it).</p>
789
790<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
791error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
792still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
793bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
794means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
795error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
796Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
797doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
798at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
799(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
800dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
801functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
802libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
803it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
804
805<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
806disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
807to -Os by default now.</p>
808
Rob Landley8390c652012-12-19 09:16:45 -0600809<hr><b>December 15, 2012</b>
810<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
811thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
812go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
813</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
814
815<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
816<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
817just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
818Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
819a new stable version.</p>
820
821<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
822(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
823bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
824support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
825Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
826The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
827-fenq.</p>
828
829<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
830and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
831features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
832
833<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
834level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
835than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
836or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
837earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
838the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
839(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
840
841<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
842Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
843full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
844stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
845it).</p>
846
847<p>The open group broke their website so the
848<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
849now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
850pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
851I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
852
853<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
854because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
855implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
856to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
857but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
858filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
859
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600860<hr><b>November 13, 2012</b>
861<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
862- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
863
864<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
865<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
866
867<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
868Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
869md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
870unix2dos).</p>
871
872<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
873default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
874Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
875
876<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
877"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
878the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
879and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
880An android directory is planned (see the updated
881<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
882
883<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
884global block are now automatically generated, commands should
885#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
886command.</p>
887
888<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
889in them, such as switch_root.</p>
890
891<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
892uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
893The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
894properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
895fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
896calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
897and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
898break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
899properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
900fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
901fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
902on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
903on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
904a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
905partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
906this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
907wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
908some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
909successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
910versions was added to portability.h.</p>
911
912<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
913rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
914the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
915document, where applicable.</p>
916
917<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
918a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
919
920<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
921back now.</p>
922</span>
923
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500924<hr><b>July 23, 2012</b>
925<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
926out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
927out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
928
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600929<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
930<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500931
932<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
933the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
934
935<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
936taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
937contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
938case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
939
940<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
941<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
942<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
943to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
944fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
945corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
946glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
947pending output on exit.</p>
948
Rob Landleyb1cc1d12012-06-25 06:42:24 -0500949<hr><b>June 25, 2012</b>
950<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>
951
952<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
953<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
954mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
955x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
956now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
957suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
958musl libc.</p>
959
960<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
961it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
962pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
963</span>
964
965<hr><b>June 12, 2012</b>
966<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
967he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
968wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
969muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
970always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
971the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
972
973<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
974so here it is, based
975on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
976statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
977actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
978that).</p>
979
980<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
981doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
982The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
983threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
984more frequent from here on.</p>
985
986<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
987tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
988which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
989
990<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
991chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
992you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
993on slackware.</p>
994
995<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
996mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
997vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
998Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
999
1000<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
1001wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
1002deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
1003musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
1004some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
1005
1006<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
1007to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
1008problematic).</p>
1009
1010<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
1011yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
1012SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
1013multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
1014segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
1015posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
1016release.)</p>
1017
1018<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
1019for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
1020is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
1021
1022<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
1023Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
1024'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
1025(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
1026yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
10271.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
1028
1029
Rob Landleyed6ed622012-03-06 20:49:03 -06001030<hr><b>March 3, 2012</b>
1031
1032<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
1033without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
1034Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
1035for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p>
1036</p></blockquote>
1037
1038<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
1039on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This
1040time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
1041binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
1042
1043<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
1044have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
1045
1046<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
1047insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
1048realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel
1049Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
1050for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
1051Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
1052cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
1053
1054<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
1055code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
1056code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
1057bloat-o-meter.)</p>
1058
1059<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
1060Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
1061more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
1062Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
1063optimizations.</p>
1064
1065<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
1066dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
1067and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
1068
Rob Landleye258af32008-01-05 18:09:49 -06001069
Rob Landleyd11ac702012-02-13 21:16:03 -06001070<hr><b>February 12, 2012</b>
1071<blockquote><p>
1072"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
1073least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
1074important respects..."</p>
1075<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
1076
1077<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
1078<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
1079point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably
1080ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
1081finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
1082patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
1083
1084<p>More to come...</p>
1085
Rob Landleyce8a2672012-02-02 07:27:05 -06001086<hr>
1087<p><b>November 15, 2011</b> - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
1088clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
1089implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
1090
1091<p>More to come...</p>
1092
1093<hr>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -06001094
Rob Landleyaba51702012-08-26 16:33:06 -05001095<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -06001096
1097<!--#include file="footer.html" -->