thoughts on reorganizing BB menuconfig structure?

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 02:39:21PM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> * drop "Debian Utilities" entirely and spread those entries elsewhere

IMO it's informative to have these listed under Debian utilities. In
case the user is not familiar with basic unix tools and which ones are
essential for a normal system, putting these under Debian makes it
clear that they're nonstandard extensions and only needed for use with
Debian scripts or the like.

> * move "dmesg" to "Logging Utilities"?

I think it's a "Linux System Utility" because it's Linux-specific,
unlike other tools which could work with different operating systems
just as well.

> * i don't consider "ar" to be an "Archival Utility".  i see it more as
> a Development utility.  how many people are actually using "ar" for
> archiving?

It's not very useful as a development tool without alsohaving ranlib,
since it can't generate the index for the contained .o files. IIRC
either RPM or dpkg uses ar files as archives.

> * how about an entire section devoted to "Shell Applets"?  by that,
> i mean applets normally used, say, for shell programming:
> 
>   true, false, echo, expr, getopt, dirname, basename, length, env,
>   printenv, printf, and lots more.
> 
>   that would cut down the size of "Coreutils" considerably.

Probably a good idea.

> * how about a section on "Servers"?  right now, it would be rather
> short (telnetd, udhcpd) but who knows what else might show up there?

Might be useful in the future. Probably not needed yet but couldn't
hurt.

> * several applets should be moved to "Process Utilities", such as
> "nice", "watch", etc.  don't those qualify as "process" utilities?

I think "process utilities" is just meant to be programs that need to
look at the list of running processes, but maybe I'm mistaken.

Rich