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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 Landleye0269f12015-04-05 20:00:33 -050011<hr><b>April 5, 2015</b>
12<p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and
13<a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a>
14and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a>
15and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a>
16and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather
17than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo
18<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's
19<a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p>
20
Rob Landleyba3e32b2015-02-27 08:13:24 -060021<hr><b>February 25, 2015</b>
22<blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design
23something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of
24complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
25
26<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a>
27(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p>
28
29<p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From
30Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and
31base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android),
32mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from
33Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p>
34
35<p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to
36both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this
37involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen
38commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working
39with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p>
40
41<p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone
42binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending
43on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone.
44This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency
45generation, making each command have its own config
46symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another
47command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone
48at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh"
49has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the
50multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p>
51
52<p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has
53been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are
54<a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a>
55<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken
56archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p>
57
58<h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3>
59
60<p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig,
61Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments,
62Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to
63the wrong short options,
64Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending.
65Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from
66looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c
67(in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets
68priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's
69HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need
70to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p>
71
72<p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination
73and touch -h.</p>
74
75<p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to
76re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit,
77it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command").
78
79<p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination
80over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs).
81Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because
82the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side,
83so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p>
84
85<p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list
86no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end).
87Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix
88semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want
89to.)</p>
90
91<p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to
92interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite
93promoted out of pending yet.<p>
94
95<p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and
96did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a
97directory, which was not the problem).</p>
98
99<p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for
100what that's worth.</p>
101
102<p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README
103(a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed
104another pass).</p>
105
106<h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3>
107
108<p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build
109standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit
110values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled
111flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed.
112This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if
113your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config),
114you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right
115to left they'll have the same values.</p>
116
117<p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken
118standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not
119the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't
120copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so
121if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the
122end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons.
123(Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current
124locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your
125allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really
126bad at strings.)
127Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't
128fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily
129an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p>
130
131<p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow,
132you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares
133about overflow.</p>
134
135<p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not
136supported, so stop using it.</p>
137
138<p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't
139need a separate xexec_optargs().</p>
140
141<hr><b>February 18, 2015</b>
142<p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so
143here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another
144list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p>
145
146<p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman,
147but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing
148wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a
149<a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale
150data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p>
151
152<p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding
153all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's
154web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18.
155The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping
156the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p>
157
Rob Landley774c5992014-12-30 14:49:02 -0600158<hr><b>December 30, 2014</b>
159<p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a>
160<a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman
161work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at
162<a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar
163on the left.</p>
164
165<p>You still subscribe to the list through
166<a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p>
167
Rob Landleyba3e32b2015-02-27 08:13:24 -0600168<p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p>
169
Rob Landleydc5bd762014-11-28 16:53:59 -0600170<hr><b>November 19, 2014</b>
171
172<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>
173
174<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a>
175(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p>
176
177<p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands,
178but they're all in pending.</p>
179
180<h3>Development</h3>
181
182<p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although
183it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of
184Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we
185don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch.
186(The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of
187implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's
188still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now.
189Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04?
190Yeah...)</p>
191
192<p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to
193make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands
194to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p>
195
196<blockquote><p>
197wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*,
198less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join,
199nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand,
200users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk
201</p></blockquote>
202
203<p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p>
204
205<p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan).
206Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing,
207and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending.
208Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d
209was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it
210should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too.
211Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an
212unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p>
213
214<p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and
215ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a
216pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod,
217losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by
218static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the
219TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini
220also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link
221creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p>
222
223<p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal
224function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p>
225
226<p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each
227line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create
228a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business,
229but the output is tidier now.)</p>
230
231<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
232
233<p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile
234probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that
235use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic,
236but in theory it's possible now.</p>
237
238<p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications
239if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail
240to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p>
241
242<p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop
243function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must
244close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p>
245
246<p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into
247a new unescape() function.</p>
248
Rob Landley037009f2014-10-02 07:53:27 -0500249<hr><b>October 2, 2014</b>
250<blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
251The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss...
252Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the
253difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote>
254
255<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a>
256(<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p>
257
258<h3>New commands</h3>
259
260<p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands
261(cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p>
262
263<p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now
264ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth
265instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving
266looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to
267cut, touch, free, and id.</p>
268
269<p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini
270Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded
271fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code.
272Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p>
273
274<h3>Build infrastructure</h3>
275
276<p><b>Parallel builds</b></p>
277
278<p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of
279processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.)
280Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain
281about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now
282gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p>
283
284<p><b>Standalone builds</b></p>
285
286<p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to
287build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file
288selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro
289for the command. It enables each command's
290sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build
291full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when
292the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro
293now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY
294without the NEWTOY</p>
295
296<p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that
297aren't building standalone yet are:</p>
298
299<blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos,
300whoami</p></blockquote>
301
302<p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY()
303entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries
304that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure
305is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command
306is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the
307code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible
308to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting
309design goals in the two contexts.)</p>
310
311<p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual
312commands.
313
314<p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p>
315
316<p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh
317containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current
318configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an
319exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite
320got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p>
321
322<h3>Internals</h3>
323
324<p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking
325filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now
326done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added
327to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now
328requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false).
329Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various
330pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can
331use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode.
332Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether
333we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p>
334
335<p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges
336(which happens when you suid something _other_ than root).
337The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the
338command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled),
339toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse
340internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth),
341always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when
342we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes,
343dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in
344error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an
345option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments
346saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched
347off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio.
348Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall
349with no arguments (segfaulted).</p>
350
351<p><b>Portability</b></p>
352
353<p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx
354to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl
355maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed
356instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section
357to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your
358build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do
359a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make
360it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns
361requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch
362to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current
363musl source control.)</p>
364
365<p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have
366another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p>
367
368<p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p>
369
370<p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small
371allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing
372"$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic
373is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux
374filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters
375we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd),
376newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in
377filesystem).</p>
378
379<h3>Documentation</h3>
380
381<p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html
382documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently
383(it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p>
384
385<p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup
386before the pending directory was added.</p>
387
388<h3>Test Suite</h3>
389
390<p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the
391testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p>
392
393<p>Johan Bergström requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to
394stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu
395sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p>
396
397<p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat,
398and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p>
399
Rob Landley8bae3142014-07-07 07:32:56 -0500400<hr><b>July 7, 2014</b>
401<blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
402most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
403solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
404concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd
405because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were
406unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
407
408<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>
409
410<p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include:
411lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs,
412killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han,
413sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh,
414host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p>
415
416<p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending):
417sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5,
418fallocate, and nbd-client.</p>
419
420<p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps,
421bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd,
422login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's
423still more to do on all of those.)</p>
424
425<p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against
426musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't
427support that target yet.)</p>
428
429<p><b>Documentation:</b></p>
430
431<p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with
432a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the
433"coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show
434stopper for incoming
435contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them
436during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes
437the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p>
438
439<p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the
440full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p>
441
442<p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is
443a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more
444elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option
445parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p>
446
447<p><b>Fixes</b>:</p>
448
449<p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default
450output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported
451bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init()
452was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound)
453had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be
454there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at
455the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test
456in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return
457success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and
458ferror() from xprintf().</p>
459
460<p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff
461implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some
462diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from
463a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops
464at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set,
465which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of
466chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p>
467
468<p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final
469build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of
470libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p>
471
472<p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes,
473so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities.
474So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the
475setup code to setlocale().</p>
476
477<p><b>Upgrades:</b></p>
478
479<p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it
480to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also
481added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database
482parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p>
483
484<p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making
485it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum
486for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other
487implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p>
488
489<p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname),
490the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get
491a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p>
492
493<p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP
494command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p>
495
496<p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always
497build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p>
498
499<p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so
500we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0
501filename" actually works again.</p>
502
503<p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd,
504and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill,
505groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still
506working to fix them.</p>
507
508<p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a
509dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new
510generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte
511to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's
512initialized to in toy_init).</p>
513
514<p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and
515use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro
516contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs
517decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion
518bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you
519cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the
520first one, the build break is now more informative).</p>
521
Rob Landley08e18fb2014-04-20 14:22:19 -0500522<hr><b>April 20, 2014</b>
523<blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
524which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
525had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
526far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
527turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
528
529<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
530<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
531about time too.</p>
532
533<p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
534that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
535from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
536There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
537
538<p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
539way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
540<a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
541Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
542
543<p><b>In pending:</b>
544Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
545groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
546ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
547Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
548I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
549compress.c, and still need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
550and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
551
552<p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
553cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
554in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
555work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
556documented what their output actually meant).</p>
557
558<p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
559handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
560fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
561options (all commands, html output).
562Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
563set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
564compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
565sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
566Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
567to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
568allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
569tftpd. Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
570that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
571Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
572pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
573find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
574the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
575now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
576aliasing.</p>
577
578<p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
579can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
580.c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
581bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
582i
583<p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
584not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
585was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
586configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
587
588<p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
589build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
590the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
591
592<p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
593xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
594and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
595get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
596xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
597bzcat.c.</p>
598
599<p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
600help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
601The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
602#including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
603<a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
604of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
605good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
606at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
607
Rob Landley78663502013-11-19 09:44:48 -0600608<hr><b>November 18, 2013</b>
609<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." -
610The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
611
Rob Landley4d886d62014-03-08 19:26:33 -0600612<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 -0600613<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
614
615<p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
616reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
617pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
618cleanup.</p>
619
620<p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
621into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
622dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
623an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
624
625<p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
626added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
627William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
628(the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
629where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
630I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
631the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
632synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
633$CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
634a typo in the web page.</p>
635
636<p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
637bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
638--longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
639querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
640debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
641The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
642micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
643now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
644
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500645<hr><b>September 17, 2013</b>
646<blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
647Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
648station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
649and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
650</blockquote>
651
652<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
653<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
654
655<p>This release adds
656several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
657submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
658a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
659acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
660
661<p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
662The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
663instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
664Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
665other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
666heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
667namespace support.</p>
668
669<h3>Pending</h3>
670
671<p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
672probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
673dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
Rob Landleyd2774142013-10-04 14:32:39 -0500674Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
Rob Landley5cab9942013-09-18 10:50:38 -0500675syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
676test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
677M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
678
679<p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
680ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
681and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
682logger and syslogd...</p>
683
684<p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
685but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
686expand, and touch.</p>
687
688<h3>Infrastructure</h3>
689
690<p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
691multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
692OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
693command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
694you're curious, you can do:</p>
695
696<blockquote><pre>
697make defconfig
698make
699mkdir singles
700for i in $(./toybox)
701do
702 echo $i
703 PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
704done
705</pre>
706<p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
707</blockquote>
708
709<p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
710time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
711
712<p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
713not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
714functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
715This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
716
717<p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
718logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
719should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
720option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
721--color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
722
723<p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
724does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
725for us".</p>
726
727<p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
728It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
729so much anymore.</p>
730
731<p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
732linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
733using it now.</p>
734
735<p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
736(-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
737that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
738into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
739"-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
740
741<h3>Bugfixes</h3>
742
743<p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
744finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
745someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
746Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
747
748<p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
749python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
750for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
751then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
752
753<p>Ashwini Sharma
754pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
755configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
756
757<p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
758a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p>
759
760<p>The new function xexec_optargs()
761replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
762during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
763
764<p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
765didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
766between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
767command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
768
769<p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
770delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
771should now be fixed.</p>
772
773<p>
Rob Landley49f8d6f2013-07-26 13:04:21 -0500774<hr><b>July 26, 2013</b>
775<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
776mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
777mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
778against it and post them to the list.</p>
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500779
Isaac Dunhamc810f9f2013-07-06 11:26:15 -0500780<hr><b>July 2, 2013</b>
781<blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
782should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
783like you." -
784The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
785
786<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
787<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
788uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
789default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
790enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
791Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
792</p>
793
794<p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
795each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
796and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
797
798<p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
799logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
800Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
801(It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
802
803<p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
804more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
805<a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
806of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
807
808<p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
809condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
810-l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
811Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
812and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
813corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
814Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
815fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
816field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
817to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
818moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
819stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
820last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
821(ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
822</p>
823
824<p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
825variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
826debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
827that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
828just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
829against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
830for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
831various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
832(breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
833
834<p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
835system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
836release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
837Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
838</p>
839
840<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
841BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
842paragraph now says:</p>
843
844<blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
845software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
846
847<p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
848permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
849copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
850that 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
851both 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
852less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
853the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
854
855<p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
856or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
857BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
858
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500859<hr><b>March 21, 2013</b>
860<p>Video of my ELC talk
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500861"<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500862is up on youtube. Related materials include the
863<a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
864<a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
865
Rob Landleye566f3a2013-06-16 20:02:38 -0500866<p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
867the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
868
869<ul>
870<li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
871 <ul>
872 <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
873 <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
874 </ul>
875<li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
876 <ul>
877 <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
878 </ul>
879<li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
880<li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
881<li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
882 <ul>
883 <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
884 <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
885 <ul>
886 <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
887 <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
888 </ul>
889 </ul>
890</ul>
891</span>
892
893
Rob Landley6f5ef6f2013-03-21 20:21:12 -0500894<hr><b>March 14, 2013</b>
895<blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
896The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
897
898<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
899<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
900the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
901
902<p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
903getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
904"id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
905instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
906Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
907can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
908
909<p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
910Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
911Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
912should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
913
914<p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
915(klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
916
Rob Landley9a69a922013-02-23 18:32:08 -0600917<hr><b>January 18, 2013</b>
918<blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
919
920<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
921<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
922are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
923<a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
924
925<p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
926and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
927kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
928Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
929
930<p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
931readlink commands. The segfault in ls
932happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
933default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
934extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
935a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
936code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
937suite checks for it).</p>
938
939<p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
940error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
941still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
942bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
943means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
944error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
945Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
946doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
947at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
948(and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
949dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
950functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
951libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
952it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
953
954<p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
955disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
956to -Os by default now.</p>
957
Rob Landley8390c652012-12-19 09:16:45 -0600958<hr><b>December 15, 2012</b>
959<blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
960thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
961go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
962</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
963
964<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
965<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
966just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
967Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
968a new stable version.</p>
969
970<p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
971(from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
972bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
973support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
974Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
975The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
976-fenq.</p>
977
978<p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
979and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
980features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
981
982<p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
983level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
984than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
985or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
986earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
987the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
988(so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
989
990<p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
991Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
992full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
993stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
994it).</p>
995
996<p>The open group broke their website so the
997<a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
998now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
999pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
1000I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
1001
1002<p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
1003because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
1004implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
1005to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
1006but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
1007filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
1008
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -06001009<hr><b>November 13, 2012</b>
1010<blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
1011- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
1012
1013<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
1014<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
1015
1016<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
1017Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
1018md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
1019unix2dos).</p>
1020
1021<p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
1022default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
1023Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
1024
1025<p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
1026"posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
1027the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
1028and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
1029An android directory is planned (see the updated
1030<a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
1031
1032<p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
1033global block are now automatically generated, commands should
1034#define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
1035command.</p>
1036
1037<p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
1038in them, such as switch_root.</p>
1039
1040<p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
1041uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
1042The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
1043properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
1044fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
1045calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
1046and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
1047break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
1048properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
1049fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
1050fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
1051on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
1052on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
1053a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
1054partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
1055this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
1056wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
1057some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
1058successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
1059versions was added to portability.h.</p>
1060
1061<p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
1062rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
1063the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
1064document, where applicable.</p>
1065
1066<p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
1067a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
1068
1069<p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
1070back now.</p>
1071</span>
1072
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -05001073<hr><b>July 23, 2012</b>
1074<blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
1075out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
1076out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
1077
Rob Landley571b0702012-11-13 16:13:45 -06001078<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
1079<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
Rob Landley31103f92012-08-25 11:51:25 -05001080
1081<p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
1082the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
1083
1084<p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
1085taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
1086contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
1087case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
1088
1089<p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
1090<a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
1091<a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
1092to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
1093fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
1094corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
1095glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
1096pending output on exit.</p>
1097
Rob Landleyb1cc1d12012-06-25 06:42:24 -05001098<hr><b>June 25, 2012</b>
1099<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>
1100
1101<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
1102<a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
1103mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
1104x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
1105now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
1106suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
1107musl libc.</p>
1108
1109<p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
1110it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
1111pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
1112</span>
1113
1114<hr><b>June 12, 2012</b>
1115<blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
1116he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
1117wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
1118muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
1119always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
1120the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
1121
1122<p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
1123so here it is, based
1124on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
1125statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
1126actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
1127that).</p>
1128
1129<p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
1130doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
1131The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
1132threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
1133more frequent from here on.</p>
1134
1135<p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
1136tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
1137which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
1138
1139<p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
1140chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
1141you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
1142on slackware.</p>
1143
1144<p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
1145mkdir -m). Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
1146vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
1147Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
1148
1149<p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
1150wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
1151deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
1152musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
1153some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
1154
1155<p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
1156to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
1157problematic).</p>
1158
1159<p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
1160yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
1161SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
1162multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
1163segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
1164posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
1165release.)</p>
1166
1167<p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
1168for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
1169is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
1170
1171<p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
1172Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
1173'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
1174(The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
1175yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
11761.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
1177
1178
Rob Landleyed6ed622012-03-06 20:49:03 -06001179<hr><b>March 3, 2012</b>
1180
1181<blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
1182without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
1183Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
1184for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p>
1185</p></blockquote>
1186
1187<p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
1188on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>. This
1189time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
1190binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
1191
1192<p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
1193have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
1194
1195<p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
1196insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename. Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
1197realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall. Daniel
1198Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
1199for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
1200Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
1201cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
1202
1203<p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
1204code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
1205code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
1206bloat-o-meter.)</p>
1207
1208<p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
1209Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
1210more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
1211Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
1212optimizations.</p>
1213
1214<p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
1215dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
1216and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
1217
Rob Landleye258af32008-01-05 18:09:49 -06001218
Rob Landleyd11ac702012-02-13 21:16:03 -06001219<hr><b>February 12, 2012</b>
1220<blockquote><p>
1221"for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
1222least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
1223important respects..."</p>
1224<p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
1225
1226<p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
1227<a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
1228point than anything particularly useful. 47 commands in a reasonably
1229ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
1230finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
1231patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
1232
1233<p>More to come...</p>
1234
Rob Landleyce8a2672012-02-02 07:27:05 -06001235<hr>
1236<p><b>November 15, 2011</b> - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
1237clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
1238implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
1239
1240<p>More to come...</p>
1241
1242<hr>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -06001243
Rob Landleyaba51702012-08-26 16:33:06 -05001244<p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
Rob Landley589f5cd2010-01-05 10:41:52 -06001245
1246<!--#include file="footer.html" -->