[BusyBox] Improving Our Development Process

[Mark Whitley]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 05:49:49PM -0500, Gennady Feldman wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 08:43:30AM +1300, Alex King wrote:
> > >
> > > I also wonder about code which is shared between bb and netkit-tiny.
> > > One solution would be a shared lib for utilities.c, but this would be
> > > a bit over the top.
> > >
> > > Is it possible to keep the codebase together and just build two
> > > separate binaries, or have an option to build them as one binary?
> > > What disadvantage would there be in doing this?
> >[clipped]
> 
> I actually thought about this for some time, and since I stepped up to
> maintain netkit-tiny I also have a couple of ideas. We could create a
> source tree in CVS, something like:
>  busybox_main  (some common name for the whole project)
>    \common    (subdirectory/sub project could be checkedout separately
> 		contains common files
> 
>    \busybox     contains busybox files
> 
>    \netkit-tiny contains netkit-tiny

[snip]

I thought about something like this before back when we were debating getting
a better configuration system in place. What I'd like to see is a set of
"applet pools" containing logical groupings of applets: i.e. fileutils,
shellutils, netutils, minimal, etc. There could be some crossover as well; a
single applet could belong to more than one pool: i.e. the 'ls' applet could
belong to the 'fileutils' pool as well as the 'minimal' pool. Then, we could
have makefile targets for building each of the pools, such that a person could
type:

	make shellutils
	make netutils
	make minimal
	(etc...)

I haven't given this a lot of thought, but one way to make this happen is with
"canned" Config.h files that contain a listing of the applets in a given pool.

This would also make it very easy for people to build seperate binaries for
network apps and shell apps (which was the original intent of the netkit-tiny
split).

Anyone like this idea?


Mark Whitley
markw at lineo.com