I'd like to be a tester of busybox

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 09:33:40PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > If you are desktop guy - try to replace as much of desktop tools
>  > with relevant busybox applets as practical. Expect some breakage.
>  > For example: ls -i is not supported.
> 
> i really can't agree with this advice.  not if you're a serious
> developer, and your desktop is important to you.  the utilities
> in busybox just aren't ready for prime time, in my opinion.  (and

they work fine for me.

> here's a minor example that we noticed today: "busybox tar -tv"
> doesn't show the major/minor numbers of device nodes from the
> archive.  this isn't something that would probably be a problem
> on an embedded system (and if it did, it would hopefully be
> caught in testing) but on a desktop, it could cause some user
> confusion or frustration.  there are lots more like this.

i don't think i've ever looked for device node numbers in a tar file.
in fact the last time i extracted a tar as root was probably many
years ago...

> i'm _not_ saying busybox is no good.  i'm saying that one should
> be well aware of it's (many) limitations before putting it to a
> task that it may not be ready for.

this is true, but i think you're exaggerating them.

rich