avoiding the kitchen sink (was Re: Dropbear...)

[Rob Landley]

On Wednesday 05 October 2005 09:20, Paul Fox wrote:
> it sort of seems to me that when the notion of "drop in"
> integration comes up (as for udhcp, and as proposed for
> dropbear), then it's not clear there's such a big win.
> maintenance certainly doesn't get easier -- witness having to sync
> the standalone and busybox versions of the udhcp svn trees, which
> i still haven't done.

I avoid touching dhcp at all because then there would be some strange 
obligation put upon me to fix some out-of-tree version I actively don't care 
about.  I'm not going there.  It can rot for all I care.

> and i'd bet that much of the savings of 
> making something an applet could be had simply by making libbb
> available for external programs to link against.  i'd think this
> (making libbb available) would be a good tradeoff for packages
> that are really too big to add to busybox, but small enough to
> make it worth doing the common busybox downsizing tricks.

And if somebody _was_ going to propose an "integrated" version at some time in 
the future, using libbb first would be the majority of the work.

However, I'm not sure dropbear actually wants a dependency on an unnecessary 
external library like libbb.  It doesn't even have a dependency on openssl.

Rob