Fwd: busybox current status

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 30 November 2006 7:14 am, walter harms wrote:

> LIBBUSYBOX is more or less a clever wrapper around the the libc. so far i 
understand
> was the approach doomed because the interface was to volatile to be useful 
in other
> project.

The point of libbusybox was never to offer a stable library other projects 
could use.  The point was to do "make standalone" (what I eventually 
implemented a bit of as scripts/individual) with less code duplication.

The API is _not_ stable (and committing to one would just bloat busybox), the 
license is gpl (not lgpl), it's not documented, and it's a complete 
misinterpretation to think that's what it was ever for in the first place.

> In other words to make it useful we need a API freeze and a wrapper to 
> the then current libbb.

Bad idea, sheer bloat, etc.

> This can be done but would require a maintainer for that API 
> stuff because the main target for busybox is not exactly to keep a stable
> API. 

It would be _bad_ for busybox to try to maintain a stable API because if we 
think of a better way, we do that, and cleanup all the fallout from the 
change.  And proposing that we _stop_ doing that misses the point of the 
entire project.

Rob
-- 
"Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but
when there is no longer anything to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery