On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 07:14:39AM +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > To use busybox as busybox in Debian means patching a few hundred > packages to understand what busybox can and cannot do. There is a > reason that busybox is smaller than the alternatives - it does less. > Unfortunately, Debian expects every option to work precisely as it > would from coreutils and it is unreasonable to expect busybox to > support everything.
Understood. My intention for my ad-hoc squeeze/grip system was to have busybox symlinks only as fallbacks in a directory that was always last in $PATH. Because busybox didn't Provides: arping, the "dumbed down" busybox arping would be around for sysadmins, but if another Debian package needed the "real" arping, it'd have Depends: arping. That would mean that the real arping would get installed and placed in a higher priority path than the busybox symlink, so while the real arping was installed, it would be used automatically. Actually, the initial reason I started thinking about this was because I didn't have vi installed, and vipw tried to run vi instead of using sensible-editor, and it failed because I didn't have vi installed. I thought "I don't want other sysadmins to waste space on this device by installing vim. I will trick them by creating a symlink to busybox's vi, which will be suffice for emergency editing." From there it was a small step to thinking about doing this for other busybox applets, so e.g. bzip2 so tar -j would magically work. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
