| Rob Landley | 349ff52 | 2014-01-04 13:09:42 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | <html><head><title>toybox news</title> |
| Rob Landley | 589f5cd | 2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 2 | <!--#include file="header.html" --> |
| 3 | |
| Rob Landley | 5cab994 | 2013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 4 | <p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together |
| Rob Landley | e566f3a | 2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 5 | into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast, |
| 6 | reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into |
| Rob Landley | 49f8d6f | 2013-07-26 13:04:21 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 7 | a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p> |
| 8 | |
| 9 | <h2>News</h2> |
| Rob Landley | 08e18fb | 2014-04-20 14:22:19 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 10 | |
| Rob Landley | dc5bd76 | 2014-11-28 16:53:59 -0600 | [diff] [blame^] | 11 | <hr><b>November 19, 2014</b> |
| 12 | |
| 13 | <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> |
| 14 | |
| 15 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a> |
| 16 | (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p> |
| 17 | |
| 18 | <p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands, |
| 19 | but they're all in pending.</p> |
| 20 | |
| 21 | <h3>Development</h3> |
| 22 | |
| 23 | <p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although |
| 24 | it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of |
| 25 | Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we |
| 26 | don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch. |
| 27 | (The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of |
| 28 | implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's |
| 29 | still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now. |
| 30 | Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04? |
| 31 | Yeah...)</p> |
| 32 | |
| 33 | <p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to |
| 34 | make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands |
| 35 | to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p> |
| 36 | |
| 37 | <blockquote><p> |
| 38 | wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*, |
| 39 | less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, |
| 40 | nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand, |
| 41 | users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk |
| 42 | </p></blockquote> |
| 43 | |
| 44 | <p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p> |
| 45 | |
| 46 | <p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan). |
| 47 | Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing, |
| 48 | and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending. |
| 49 | Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d |
| 50 | was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it |
| 51 | should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too. |
| 52 | Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an |
| 53 | unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p> |
| 54 | |
| 55 | <p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and |
| 56 | ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a |
| 57 | pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod, |
| 58 | losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by |
| 59 | static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the |
| 60 | TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini |
| 61 | also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link |
| 62 | creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p> |
| 63 | |
| 64 | <p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal |
| 65 | function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p> |
| 66 | |
| 67 | <p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each |
| 68 | line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create |
| 69 | a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business, |
| 70 | but the output is tidier now.)</p> |
| 71 | |
| 72 | <h3>Infrastructure</h3> |
| 73 | |
| 74 | <p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile |
| 75 | probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that |
| 76 | use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic, |
| 77 | but in theory it's possible now.</p> |
| 78 | |
| 79 | <p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications |
| 80 | if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail |
| 81 | to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p> |
| 82 | |
| 83 | <p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop |
| 84 | function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must |
| 85 | close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p> |
| 86 | |
| 87 | <p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into |
| 88 | a new unescape() function.</p> |
| 89 | |
| Rob Landley | 037009f | 2014-10-02 07:53:27 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 90 | <hr><b>October 2, 2014</b> |
| 91 | <blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. |
| 92 | The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss... |
| 93 | Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the |
| 94 | difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote> |
| 95 | |
| 96 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a> |
| 97 | (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p> |
| 98 | |
| 99 | <h3>New commands</h3> |
| 100 | |
| 101 | <p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands |
| 102 | (cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p> |
| 103 | |
| 104 | <p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now |
| 105 | ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth |
| 106 | instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving |
| 107 | looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to |
| 108 | cut, touch, free, and id.</p> |
| 109 | |
| 110 | <p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini |
| 111 | Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded |
| 112 | fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code. |
| 113 | Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p> |
| 114 | |
| 115 | <h3>Build infrastructure</h3> |
| 116 | |
| 117 | <p><b>Parallel builds</b></p> |
| 118 | |
| 119 | <p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of |
| 120 | processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.) |
| 121 | Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain |
| 122 | about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now |
| 123 | gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p> |
| 124 | |
| 125 | <p><b>Standalone builds</b></p> |
| 126 | |
| 127 | <p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to |
| 128 | build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file |
| 129 | selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro |
| 130 | for the command. It enables each command's |
| 131 | sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build |
| 132 | full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when |
| 133 | the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro |
| 134 | now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY |
| 135 | without the NEWTOY</p> |
| 136 | |
| 137 | <p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that |
| 138 | aren't building standalone yet are:</p> |
| 139 | |
| 140 | <blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos, |
| 141 | whoami</p></blockquote> |
| 142 | |
| 143 | <p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY() |
| 144 | entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries |
| 145 | that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure |
| 146 | is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command |
| 147 | is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the |
| 148 | code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible |
| 149 | to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting |
| 150 | design goals in the two contexts.)</p> |
| 151 | |
| 152 | <p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual |
| 153 | commands. |
| 154 | |
| 155 | <p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p> |
| 156 | |
| 157 | <p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh |
| 158 | containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current |
| 159 | configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an |
| 160 | exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite |
| 161 | got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p> |
| 162 | |
| 163 | <h3>Internals</h3> |
| 164 | |
| 165 | <p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking |
| 166 | filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now |
| 167 | done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added |
| 168 | to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now |
| 169 | requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false). |
| 170 | Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various |
| 171 | pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can |
| 172 | use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode. |
| 173 | Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether |
| 174 | we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p> |
| 175 | |
| 176 | <p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges |
| 177 | (which happens when you suid something _other_ than root). |
| 178 | The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the |
| 179 | command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled), |
| 180 | toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse |
| 181 | internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth), |
| 182 | always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when |
| 183 | we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes, |
| 184 | dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in |
| 185 | error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an |
| 186 | option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments |
| 187 | saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched |
| 188 | off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio. |
| 189 | Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall |
| 190 | with no arguments (segfaulted).</p> |
| 191 | |
| 192 | <p><b>Portability</b></p> |
| 193 | |
| 194 | <p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx |
| 195 | to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl |
| 196 | maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed |
| 197 | instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section |
| 198 | to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your |
| 199 | build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do |
| 200 | a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make |
| 201 | it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns |
| 202 | requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch |
| 203 | to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current |
| 204 | musl source control.)</p> |
| 205 | |
| 206 | <p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have |
| 207 | another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p> |
| 208 | |
| 209 | <p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p> |
| 210 | |
| 211 | <p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small |
| 212 | allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing |
| 213 | "$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic |
| 214 | is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux |
| 215 | filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters |
| 216 | we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd), |
| 217 | newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in |
| 218 | filesystem).</p> |
| 219 | |
| 220 | <h3>Documentation</h3> |
| 221 | |
| 222 | <p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html |
| 223 | documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently |
| 224 | (it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p> |
| 225 | |
| 226 | <p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup |
| 227 | before the pending directory was added.</p> |
| 228 | |
| 229 | <h3>Test Suite</h3> |
| 230 | |
| 231 | <p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the |
| 232 | testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p> |
| 233 | |
| 234 | <p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to |
| 235 | stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu |
| 236 | sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p> |
| 237 | |
| 238 | <p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat, |
| 239 | and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p> |
| 240 | |
| Rob Landley | 8bae314 | 2014-07-07 07:32:56 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 241 | <hr><b>July 7, 2014</b> |
| 242 | <blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: |
| 243 | most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many |
| 244 | solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely |
| 245 | concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd |
| 246 | because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were |
| 247 | unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 248 | |
| 249 | <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> |
| 250 | |
| 251 | <p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include: |
| 252 | lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs, |
| 253 | killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han, |
| 254 | sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh, |
| 255 | host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p> |
| 256 | |
| 257 | <p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending): |
| 258 | sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5, |
| 259 | fallocate, and nbd-client.</p> |
| 260 | |
| 261 | <p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps, |
| 262 | bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd, |
| 263 | login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's |
| 264 | still more to do on all of those.)</p> |
| 265 | |
| 266 | <p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against |
| 267 | musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't |
| 268 | support that target yet.)</p> |
| 269 | |
| 270 | <p><b>Documentation:</b></p> |
| 271 | |
| 272 | <p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with |
| 273 | a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the |
| 274 | "coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show |
| 275 | stopper for incoming |
| 276 | contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them |
| 277 | during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes |
| 278 | the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p> |
| 279 | |
| 280 | <p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the |
| 281 | full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p> |
| 282 | |
| 283 | <p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is |
| 284 | a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more |
| 285 | elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option |
| 286 | parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p> |
| 287 | |
| 288 | <p><b>Fixes</b>:</p> |
| 289 | |
| 290 | <p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default |
| 291 | output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported |
| 292 | bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init() |
| 293 | was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound) |
| 294 | had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be |
| 295 | there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at |
| 296 | the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test |
| 297 | in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return |
| 298 | success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and |
| 299 | ferror() from xprintf().</p> |
| 300 | |
| 301 | <p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff |
| 302 | implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some |
| 303 | diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from |
| 304 | a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops |
| 305 | at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set, |
| 306 | which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of |
| 307 | chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p> |
| 308 | |
| 309 | <p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final |
| 310 | build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of |
| 311 | libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p> |
| 312 | |
| 313 | <p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes, |
| 314 | so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities. |
| 315 | So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the |
| 316 | setup code to setlocale().</p> |
| 317 | |
| 318 | <p><b>Upgrades:</b></p> |
| 319 | |
| 320 | <p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it |
| 321 | to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also |
| 322 | added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database |
| 323 | parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p> |
| 324 | |
| 325 | <p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making |
| 326 | it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum |
| 327 | for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other |
| 328 | implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p> |
| 329 | |
| 330 | <p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname), |
| 331 | the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get |
| 332 | a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p> |
| 333 | |
| 334 | <p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP |
| 335 | command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p> |
| 336 | |
| 337 | <p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always |
| 338 | build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p> |
| 339 | |
| 340 | <p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so |
| 341 | we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0 |
| 342 | filename" actually works again.</p> |
| 343 | |
| 344 | <p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd, |
| 345 | and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill, |
| 346 | groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still |
| 347 | working to fix them.</p> |
| 348 | |
| 349 | <p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a |
| 350 | dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new |
| 351 | generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte |
| 352 | to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's |
| 353 | initialized to in toy_init).</p> |
| 354 | |
| 355 | <p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and |
| 356 | use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro |
| 357 | contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs |
| 358 | decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion |
| 359 | bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you |
| 360 | cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the |
| 361 | first one, the build break is now more informative).</p> |
| 362 | |
| Rob Landley | 08e18fb | 2014-04-20 14:22:19 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 363 | <hr><b>April 20, 2014</b> |
| 364 | <blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer |
| 365 | which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks |
| 366 | had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as |
| 367 | far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to |
| 368 | turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 369 | |
| 370 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on |
| 371 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And |
| 372 | about time too.</p> |
| 373 | |
| 374 | <p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h, |
| 375 | that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text |
| 376 | from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines. |
| 377 | There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p> |
| 378 | |
| 379 | <p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the |
| 380 | way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the |
| 381 | <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk, |
| 382 | Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p> |
| 383 | |
| 384 | <p><b>In pending:</b> |
| 385 | Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more, |
| 386 | groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added |
| 387 | ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty. |
| 388 | Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold. |
| 389 | I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in |
| 390 | compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side) |
| 391 | and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p> |
| 392 | |
| 393 | <p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot, |
| 394 | cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus |
| 395 | in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some |
| 396 | work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations |
| 397 | documented what their output actually meant).</p> |
| 398 | |
| 399 | <p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to |
| 400 | handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the |
| 401 | fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h |
| 402 | options (all commands, html output). |
| 403 | Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually |
| 404 | set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross |
| 405 | compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween |
| 406 | sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code. |
| 407 | Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options |
| 408 | to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and |
| 409 | allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded |
| 410 | tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after |
| 411 | that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting. |
| 412 | Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of |
| 413 | pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified |
| 414 | find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on |
| 415 | the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions |
| 416 | now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with |
| 417 | aliasing.</p> |
| 418 | |
| 419 | <p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you |
| 420 | can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same |
| 421 | .c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the |
| 422 | bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example. |
| 423 | i |
| 424 | <p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers |
| 425 | not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h |
| 426 | was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc |
| 427 | configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p> |
| 428 | |
| 429 | <p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig |
| 430 | build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily |
| 431 | the absolute latest build environment.)</p> |
| 432 | |
| 433 | <p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid(). |
| 434 | xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd |
| 435 | and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command, |
| 436 | get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and |
| 437 | xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into |
| 438 | bzcat.c.</p> |
| 439 | |
| 440 | <p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the |
| 441 | help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output. |
| 442 | The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about |
| 443 | #including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The |
| 444 | <a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading |
| 445 | of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for |
| 446 | good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion |
| 447 | at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p> |
| 448 | |
| Rob Landley | 7866350 | 2013-11-19 09:44:48 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 449 | <hr><b>November 18, 2013</b> |
| 450 | <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." - |
| 451 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 452 | |
| Rob Landley | 4d886d6 | 2014-03-08 19:26:33 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 453 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on |
| Rob Landley | 7866350 | 2013-11-19 09:44:48 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 454 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p> |
| 455 | |
| 456 | <p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted |
| 457 | reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from |
| 458 | pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some |
| 459 | cleanup.</p> |
| 460 | |
| 461 | <p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going |
| 462 | into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted |
| 463 | dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and |
| 464 | an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p> |
| 465 | |
| 466 | <p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer |
| 467 | added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem. |
| 468 | William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input |
| 469 | (the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug |
| 470 | where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault). |
| 471 | I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using |
| 472 | the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a |
| 473 | synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with |
| 474 | $CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted |
| 475 | a typo in the web page.</p> |
| 476 | |
| 477 | <p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from |
| 478 | bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by |
| 479 | --longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal |
| 480 | querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a |
| 481 | debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply). |
| 482 | The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and |
| 483 | micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite |
| 484 | now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p> |
| 485 | |
| Rob Landley | 5cab994 | 2013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 486 | <hr><b>September 17, 2013</b> |
| 487 | <blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number." |
| 488 | Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway |
| 489 | station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, |
| 490 | and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> |
| 491 | </blockquote> |
| 492 | |
| 493 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on |
| 494 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p> |
| 495 | |
| 496 | <p>This release adds |
| 497 | several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han |
| 498 | submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and |
| 499 | a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted |
| 500 | acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p> |
| 501 | |
| 502 | <p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker). |
| 503 | The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah" |
| 504 | instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in. |
| 505 | Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain |
| 506 | other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who |
| 507 | heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID |
| 508 | namespace support.</p> |
| 509 | |
| 510 | <h3>Pending</h3> |
| 511 | |
| 512 | <p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should |
| 513 | probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd, |
| 514 | dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from |
| Rob Landley | d277414 | 2013-10-04 14:32:39 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 515 | Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet), |
| Rob Landley | 5cab994 | 2013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 516 | syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar, |
| 517 | test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E. |
| 518 | M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p> |
| 519 | |
| 520 | <p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't |
| 521 | ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig |
| 522 | and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up |
| 523 | logger and syslogd...</p> |
| 524 | |
| 525 | <p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory, |
| 526 | but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du, |
| 527 | expand, and touch.</p> |
| 528 | |
| 529 | <h3>Infrastructure</h3> |
| 530 | |
| 531 | <p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the |
| 532 | multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes, |
| 533 | OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a |
| 534 | command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If |
| 535 | you're curious, you can do:</p> |
| 536 | |
| 537 | <blockquote><pre> |
| 538 | make defconfig |
| 539 | make |
| 540 | mkdir singles |
| 541 | for i in $(./toybox) |
| 542 | do |
| 543 | echo $i |
| 544 | PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break |
| 545 | done |
| 546 | </pre> |
| 547 | <p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p> |
| 548 | </blockquote> |
| 549 | |
| 550 | <p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this |
| 551 | time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p> |
| 552 | |
| 553 | <p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions |
| 554 | not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains |
| 555 | functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit). |
| 556 | This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p> |
| 557 | |
| 558 | <p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude |
| 559 | logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts |
| 560 | should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ; |
| 561 | option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E. |
| 562 | --color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p> |
| 563 | |
| 564 | <p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf |
| 565 | does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it |
| 566 | for us".</p> |
| 567 | |
| 568 | <p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid(). |
| 569 | It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite |
| 570 | so much anymore.</p> |
| 571 | |
| 572 | <p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly |
| 573 | linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are |
| 574 | using it now.</p> |
| 575 | |
| 576 | <p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag |
| 577 | (-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables) |
| 578 | that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept |
| 579 | into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler, |
| 580 | "-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p> |
| 581 | |
| 582 | <h3>Bugfixes</h3> |
| 583 | |
| 584 | <p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to |
| 585 | finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f |
| 586 | someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once). |
| 587 | Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p> |
| 588 | |
| 589 | <p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that |
| 590 | python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks |
| 591 | for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer |
| 592 | then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p> |
| 593 | |
| 594 | <p>Ashwini Sharma |
| 595 | pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some |
| 596 | configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p> |
| 597 | |
| 598 | <p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and |
| 599 | a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> |
| 600 | |
| 601 | <p>The new function xexec_optargs() |
| 602 | replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs |
| 603 | during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p> |
| 604 | |
| 605 | <p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which |
| 606 | didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup |
| 607 | between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh |
| 608 | command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p> |
| 609 | |
| 610 | <p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't |
| 611 | delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm |
| 612 | should now be fixed.</p> |
| 613 | |
| 614 | <p> |
| Rob Landley | 49f8d6f | 2013-07-26 13:04:21 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 615 | <hr><b>July 26, 2013</b> |
| 616 | <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git |
| 617 | mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the |
| 618 | mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches |
| 619 | against it and post them to the list.</p> |
| Rob Landley | e566f3a | 2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 620 | |
| Isaac Dunham | c810f9f | 2013-07-06 11:26:15 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 621 | <hr><b>July 2, 2013</b> |
| 622 | <blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You |
| 623 | should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people |
| 624 | like you." - |
| 625 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 626 | |
| 627 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on |
| 628 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds |
| 629 | uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by |
| 630 | default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and |
| 631 | enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups". |
| 632 | Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv". |
| 633 | </p> |
| 634 | |
| 635 | <p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and |
| 636 | each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help" |
| 637 | and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p> |
| 638 | |
| 639 | <p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client, |
| 640 | logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup. |
| 641 | Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up. |
| 642 | (It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p> |
| 643 | |
| 644 | <p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach |
| 645 | more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The |
| 646 | <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis |
| 647 | of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p> |
| 648 | |
| 649 | <p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected, |
| 650 | condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught |
| 651 | -l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices. |
| 652 | Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking), |
| 653 | and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no |
| 654 | corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work). |
| 655 | Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham |
| 656 | fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output |
| 657 | field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means |
| 658 | to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda |
| 659 | moved file permission display code to lib so ls and |
| 660 | stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the |
| 661 | last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it |
| 662 | (ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user). |
| 663 | </p> |
| 664 | |
| 665 | <p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global |
| 666 | variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc |
| 667 | debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and |
| 668 | that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of |
| 669 | just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking |
| 670 | against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes |
| 671 | for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes |
| 672 | various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical |
| 673 | (breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names). |
| 674 | |
| 675 | <p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build |
| 676 | system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The |
| 677 | release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control. |
| 678 | Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p> |
| 679 | </p> |
| 680 | |
| 681 | <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 |
| 682 | BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first |
| 683 | paragraph now says:</p> |
| 684 | |
| 685 | <blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this |
| 686 | software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote> |
| 687 | |
| 688 | <p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this |
| 689 | permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all |
| 690 | copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects |
| 691 | that 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 |
| 692 | both 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 |
| 693 | less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate |
| 694 | the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p> |
| 695 | |
| 696 | <p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more |
| 697 | or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it |
| 698 | BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p> |
| 699 | |
| Rob Landley | 6f5ef6f | 2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 700 | <hr><b>March 21, 2013</b> |
| 701 | <p>Video of my ELC talk |
| Rob Landley | e566f3a | 2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 702 | "<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>" |
| Rob Landley | 6f5ef6f | 2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 703 | is up on youtube. Related materials include the |
| 704 | <a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an |
| 705 | <a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p> |
| 706 | |
| Rob Landley | e566f3a | 2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 707 | <p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about |
| 708 | the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p> |
| 709 | |
| 710 | <ul> |
| 711 | <li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li> |
| 712 | <ul> |
| 713 | <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li> |
| 714 | <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li> |
| 715 | </ul> |
| 716 | <li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li> |
| 717 | <ul> |
| 718 | <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li> |
| 719 | </ul> |
| 720 | <li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li> |
| 721 | <li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li> |
| 722 | <li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li> |
| 723 | <ul> |
| 724 | <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li> |
| 725 | <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li> |
| 726 | <ul> |
| 727 | <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li> |
| 728 | <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li> |
| 729 | </ul> |
| 730 | </ul> |
| 731 | </ul> |
| 732 | </span> |
| 733 | |
| 734 | |
| Rob Landley | 6f5ef6f | 2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 735 | <hr><b>March 14, 2013</b> |
| 736 | <blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." - |
| 737 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 738 | |
| 739 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on |
| 740 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding |
| 741 | the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p> |
| 742 | |
| 743 | <p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes |
| 744 | getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds. |
| 745 | "id -Gn root" should now print root's groups |
| 746 | instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under |
| 747 | Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you |
| 748 | can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p> |
| 749 | |
| 750 | <p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending". |
| 751 | Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig. |
| 752 | Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig |
| 753 | should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p> |
| 754 | |
| 755 | <p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries |
| 756 | (klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p> |
| 757 | |
| Rob Landley | 9a69a92 | 2013-02-23 18:32:08 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 758 | <hr><b>January 18, 2013</b> |
| 759 | <blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 760 | |
| 761 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on |
| 762 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There |
| 763 | are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the |
| 764 | <a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p> |
| 765 | |
| 766 | <p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s |
| 767 | and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to |
| 768 | kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite. |
| 769 | Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p> |
| 770 | |
| 771 | <p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and |
| 772 | readlink commands. The segfault in ls |
| 773 | happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the |
| 774 | default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an |
| 775 | extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing |
| 776 | a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath() |
| 777 | code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test |
| 778 | suite checks for it).</p> |
| 779 | |
| 780 | <p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the |
| 781 | error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's |
| 782 | still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error |
| 783 | bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That |
| 784 | means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right |
| 785 | error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.) |
| 786 | Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG |
| 787 | doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with |
| 788 | at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic |
| 789 | (and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma). |
| 790 | dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree |
| 791 | functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using |
| 792 | libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means |
| 793 | it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p> |
| 794 | |
| 795 | <p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that |
| 796 | disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back |
| 797 | to -Os by default now.</p> |
| 798 | |
| Rob Landley | 8390c65 | 2012-12-19 09:16:45 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 799 | <hr><b>December 15, 2012</b> |
| 800 | <blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a |
| 801 | thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly |
| 802 | go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." |
| 803 | </p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 804 | |
| 805 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on |
| 806 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is |
| 807 | just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal |
| 808 | Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's |
| 809 | a new stable version.</p> |
| 810 | |
| 811 | <p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch |
| 812 | (from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a |
| 813 | bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8 |
| 814 | support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option. |
| 815 | Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof. |
| 816 | The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports |
| 817 | -fenq.</p> |
| 818 | |
| 819 | <p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library, |
| 820 | and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel |
| 821 | features we depend on start to drop out).</p> |
| 822 | |
| 823 | <p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per |
| 824 | level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more |
| 825 | than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out, |
| 826 | or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an |
| 827 | earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README, |
| 828 | the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory |
| 829 | (so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p> |
| 830 | |
| 831 | <p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist(). |
| 832 | Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with |
| 833 | full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to |
| 834 | stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing |
| 835 | it).</p> |
| 836 | |
| 837 | <p>The open group broke their website so the |
| 838 | <a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008 |
| 839 | now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with |
| 840 | pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while |
| 841 | I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p> |
| 842 | |
| 843 | <p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant |
| 844 | because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current |
| 845 | implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option |
| 846 | to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks, |
| 847 | but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024 |
| 848 | filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p> |
| 849 | |
| Rob Landley | 571b070 | 2012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 850 | <hr><b>November 13, 2012</b> |
| 851 | <blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins." |
| 852 | - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 853 | |
| 854 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on |
| 855 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p> |
| 856 | |
| 857 | <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and |
| 858 | Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and |
| 859 | md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix, |
| 860 | unix2dos).</p> |
| 861 | |
| 862 | <p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by |
| 863 | default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name. |
| 864 | Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p> |
| 865 | |
| 866 | <p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into |
| 867 | "posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008, |
| 868 | the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig |
| 869 | and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on). |
| 870 | An android directory is planned (see the updated |
| 871 | <a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p> |
| 872 | |
| 873 | <p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's |
| 874 | global block are now automatically generated, commands should |
| 875 | #define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that |
| 876 | command.</p> |
| 877 | |
| 878 | <p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and - |
| 879 | in them, such as switch_root.</p> |
| 880 | |
| 881 | <p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of |
| 882 | uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers. |
| 883 | The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite |
| 884 | properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's |
| 885 | fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage |
| 886 | calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp |
| 887 | and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces |
| 888 | break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite |
| 889 | properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's |
| 890 | fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib |
| 891 | fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary |
| 892 | on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending |
| 893 | on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in |
| 894 | a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking |
| 895 | partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts: |
| 896 | this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it |
| 897 | wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite |
| 898 | some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to |
| 899 | successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc |
| 900 | versions was added to portability.h.</p> |
| 901 | |
| 902 | <p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a |
| 903 | rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All |
| 904 | the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards |
| 905 | document, where applicable.</p> |
| 906 | |
| 907 | <p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into |
| 908 | a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p> |
| 909 | |
| 910 | <p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're |
| 911 | back now.</p> |
| 912 | </span> |
| 913 | |
| Rob Landley | 31103f9 | 2012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 914 | <hr><b>July 23, 2012</b> |
| 915 | <blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys |
| 916 | out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked |
| 917 | out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 918 | |
| Rob Landley | 571b070 | 2012-11-13 16:13:45 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 919 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on |
| 920 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p> |
| Rob Landley | 31103f9 | 2012-08-25 11:51:25 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 921 | |
| 922 | <p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from |
| 923 | the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p> |
| 924 | |
| 925 | <p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed |
| 926 | taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han |
| 927 | contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a |
| 928 | case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p> |
| 929 | |
| 930 | <p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the |
| 931 | <a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and |
| 932 | <a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option |
| 933 | to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime), |
| 934 | fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the |
| 935 | corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding |
| 936 | glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing |
| 937 | pending output on exit.</p> |
| 938 | |
| Rob Landley | b1cc1d1 | 2012-06-25 06:42:24 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 939 | <hr><b>June 25, 2012</b> |
| 940 | <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> |
| 941 | |
| 942 | <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit |
| 943 | <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's |
| 944 | mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than |
| 945 | x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which |
| 946 | now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test |
| 947 | suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the |
| 948 | musl libc.</p> |
| 949 | |
| 950 | <p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here |
| 951 | it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40 |
| 952 | pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p> |
| 953 | </span> |
| 954 | |
| 955 | <hr><b>June 12, 2012</b> |
| 956 | <blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that |
| 957 | he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the |
| 958 | wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was |
| 959 | muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had |
| 960 | always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely |
| 961 | the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote> |
| 962 | |
| 963 | <p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>, |
| 964 | so here it is, based |
| 965 | on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the |
| 966 | statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should |
| 967 | actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting |
| 968 | that).</p> |
| 969 | |
| 970 | <p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development |
| 971 | doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course. |
| 972 | The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which |
| 973 | threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit |
| 974 | more frequent from here on.</p> |
| 975 | |
| 976 | <p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory |
| 977 | tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that |
| 978 | which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p> |
| 979 | |
| 980 | <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown, |
| 981 | chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if |
| 982 | you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug |
| 983 | on slackware.</p> |
| 984 | |
| 985 | <p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and |
| 986 | mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint, |
| 987 | vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups. |
| 988 | Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p> |
| 989 | |
| 990 | <p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell |
| 991 | wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove |
| 992 | deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and |
| 993 | musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got |
| 994 | some cleanups and bugfixes.</p> |
| 995 | |
| 996 | <p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not |
| 997 | to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's |
| 998 | problematic).</p> |
| 999 | |
| 1000 | <p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now, |
| 1001 | yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the |
| 1002 | SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox |
| 1003 | multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer |
| 1004 | segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full |
| 1005 | posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next |
| 1006 | release.)</p> |
| 1007 | |
| 1008 | <p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros |
| 1009 | for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue |
| 1010 | is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p> |
| 1011 | |
| 1012 | <p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built |
| 1013 | Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that |
| 1014 | 'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing. |
| 1015 | (The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted |
| 1016 | yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before |
| 1017 | 1.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p> |
| 1018 | |
| 1019 | |
| Rob Landley | ed6ed62 | 2012-03-06 20:49:03 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1020 | <hr><b>March 3, 2012</b> |
| 1021 | |
| 1022 | <blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral |
| 1023 | without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them. |
| 1024 | Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking |
| 1025 | for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p> |
| 1026 | </p></blockquote> |
| 1027 | |
| 1028 | <p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based |
| 1029 | on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This |
| 1030 | time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt |
| 1031 | binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p> |
| 1032 | |
| 1033 | <p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I |
| 1034 | have not quite been keeping up.)</p> |
| 1035 | |
| 1036 | <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod, |
| 1037 | insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln, |
| 1038 | realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel |
| 1039 | Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests |
| 1040 | for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp. |
| 1041 | Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed |
| 1042 | cross compiling to work more reliably.</p> |
| 1043 | |
| 1044 | <p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's |
| 1045 | code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new |
| 1046 | code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python |
| 1047 | bloat-o-meter.)</p> |
| 1048 | |
| 1049 | <p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from |
| 1050 | Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott, |
| 1051 | more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano |
| 1052 | Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and |
| 1053 | optimizations.</p> |
| 1054 | |
| 1055 | <p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link, |
| 1056 | dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months |
| 1057 | and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p> |
| 1058 | |
| Rob Landley | e258af3 | 2008-01-05 18:09:49 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1059 | |
| Rob Landley | d11ac70 | 2012-02-13 21:16:03 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1060 | <hr><b>February 12, 2012</b> |
| 1061 | <blockquote><p> |
| 1062 | "for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at |
| 1063 | least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two |
| 1064 | important respects..."</p> |
| 1065 | <p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote> |
| 1066 | |
| 1067 | <p>Here's the first BSD licensed release, |
| 1068 | <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization |
| 1069 | point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably |
| 1070 | ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially |
| 1071 | finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several |
| 1072 | patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p> |
| 1073 | |
| 1074 | <p>More to come...</p> |
| 1075 | |
| Rob Landley | ce8a267 | 2012-02-02 07:27:05 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1076 | <hr> |
| 1077 | <p><b>November 15, 2011</b> - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2 |
| 1078 | clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line |
| 1079 | implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p> |
| 1080 | |
| 1081 | <p>More to come...</p> |
| 1082 | |
| 1083 | <hr> |
| Rob Landley | 589f5cd | 2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1084 | |
| Rob Landley | aba5170 | 2012-08-26 16:33:06 -0500 | [diff] [blame] | 1085 | <p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p> |
| Rob Landley | 589f5cd | 2010-01-05 10:41:52 -0600 | [diff] [blame] | 1086 | |
| 1087 | <!--#include file="footer.html" --> |