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      3 
      4 <p>Toybox combines common Linux command line utilities together
      5 into a single BSD-licensed executable that's simple, small, fast,
      6 reasonably standards-compliant, and powerful enough to turn Android into
      7 a development environment. See the links on the left for details.</p>
      8 
      9 <h2>News</h2>
     10 
     11 <a name="21-02-2017" /><a href="#21-02-2017"><hr><h2><b>February 21, 2017</b></h2></a>
     12 <blockquote><p>Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the
     13 Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention
     14 away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.</p>
     15 <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
     16 
     17 <p>Despite everything, <a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.3.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.3</a>
     18 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.3>git commit</a>)
     19 is out. The <u>new commands</u> this time are <b>ftpget</b>, <b>ftpput</b>, <b>microcom</b>, and <b>ascii</b>.<p>
     20 
     21 <p>We also had two command _demotions_ out of defconfig:
     22 <b>hostid</b> got moved to toys/example and
     23 switched to "default n" because despite <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html>still being in posix</a>
     24 the concept of a unique 32 bit number identifying a system is something
     25 Linux outgrew about the time Pauline Middelink wrote the first IP
     26 Masquerading code. And Elliott did a complete rewrite of <b>dmesg</b> introducing
     27 two codepaths that I didn't get a chance to unify and didn't want to
     28 hold up the release for, so that's back in pending.</p>
     29 
     30 <p><u>New features</u>: Rob added units to <b>find</b> -atime and friends
     31 (with the legacy -amin alias). Elliott added color and -w to dmesg, fallocate
     32 -o, and improved file's ELF parsing. Steve Muckle added -d and finit_module
     33 support to modprobe. Rob and Elliott tweaked the
     34 ps/top display format a bit more (extending the USER field from 8 to 18 chars
     35 and putting + at the end of string fields that got truncated).
     36 df -a isn't entirely new, but wasn't documented and needed a bugfix.</p>
     37 
     38 <p><u>Bugfixes</u>:
     39 Last release broke oneit because -c didn't get moved to xopen_stdio() (oops).
     40 Rob and Elliott simultaneously spotted ps padding each line to 99999
     41 chars when there's no tty (serial console or adb); now it pads to 80 in
     42 that case but also switches on -w to avoid field truncation. The "tty"
     43 field also sometimes had trailing debris (that's fixed now). And "top" was
     44 endlessly redrawing with out tty because receipt of the ANSI size probe
     45 results would set SIGWINCH, and handling that sent another ansi probe. (Sigh.)
     46 And while we're there, replace "ADDR" with "BIT" in ps -l so there are
     47 more than 4 chars left for the "CMD" field on 64 bit systems.</p>
     48 
     49 <p>Izabera pointed out that split -b and -l can't mix, and suggested seq should
     50 multiply to avoid accumulating rounding errors from repeated fractional
     51 increments. Wang Xiao Jian fixed a bug in sort -k.
     52 Elliott let getprop use the @ character in property names, and
     53 Dimitry Ivanov removed the name length limit for system properties.
     54 Elliott also improved some error reporting and improved top -H's display
     55 of thread names.
     56 
     57 <p>Josh Gao pointed out that recursive operations on . and .. could be ignored
     58 in chmod -R (and the resulting generic fix to dirtree_notdotdot() fixed
     59 it in several other places).</p>
     60 
     61 <p>Justin Cormack caught tar producing a warning to stdout that screwed up
     62 "tar c" to stdout.
     63 Rob fixed an option parsing bug (where switching off a --longopt in menuconfig
     64 confused the parser), and another one where an option excluding itself
     65 (ala "abc[-ab][!abc]" with "command -a -b") would segfault.</p>
     66 
     67 <p>There's some sort of gcc stack over-optimization bug where musl-libc's
     68 version of vfork() doesn't get marked with attribute(returns_twice) so
     69 stack varabiles in the same function after that get semi-randomly overwritten
     70 when the optimizer decides to reclaim the space. So add the attribute
     71 to the function the XVFORK() wrapper macro calls. (It's a nommu thing.)</p>
     72 
     73 <p>Fixed a couple variable size mismatch bugs that were only tested on 64 bit
     74 (printf %x 64) or only tested on 32 bit (modprobe), removed some
     75 unnecessary casts in stat.</p>
     76 
     77 <p>Continuing attempts to build under Android NDK brought up that posix
     78 defines the global 'stdout' as a macro, which older versions of bionic
     79 turned into an array member, but a function was using it as an argument
     80 name. (This worked in the AOSP build because it only builds against current
     81 bionic, where there's a global 'stdout'.)</p>
     82 
     83 <p>Several commits argued with clang's warning generation, eventually
     84 settling on a variant of __attribute__((__shut_up__)).</p>
     85 
     86 <p>Android should no longer give spurious error messages
     87 when you "ps -A | head" about EPIPE on output. (Older versions of bionic
     88 set an error handler on SIGPIPE, but it shouldn't do that now. More recent
     89 versions of adb set the SIGPIPE handler to SIGIGN instead of SIGDFL,
     90 leading to write returning an error message instead of silently killing
     91 the program. So we set it back to the default.)</p>
     92 
     93 <p><u>Docs</u>:
     94 Removed website link to the gmane archive (which didn't survive gmane's
     95 change of ownership). The FAQ now answers a _second_ question. (Woo!)
     96 Some roadmap updates.</p>
     97 
     98 <p><u>Build tweaks</u>:
     99 Upgraded "make install_airlock" target to only warn about missing
    100 commands (unless $PEDANTIC is set) when it sets up the hermetic build
    101 path. (The plan is still to implement everything but the toolchain
    102 binaries in toybox, but in the meantime we're symlinking other stuff from
    103 the $HOST that isn't ready yet. See
    104 <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> for an example using
    105 this.)</p>
    106 
    107 <p>Elliott and Rob continue to poke at building toybox with Android's NDK,
    108 but it's a work in progress (<a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-December/008767.html>thread</a>). Various changes
    109 removing libcutils dependencies and adding an selinux dependency to getprop
    110 are fallout from this.</p>
    111 
    112 <p>Cross-compiling from Macs needs to use "gsed" instead of apple's
    113 version, so teach the build to use that name if it exists in the $PATH.
    114 If you try to build without running config first, you should get better
    115 error reporting now. Added a workaround for Centos' broken "which" command
    116 producing output when it _can't_ find a name in the $PATH.</p>
    117 
    118 <p><u>Library</u>:
    119 The new dirtree flag DIRTREE_PROC skips non-numeric entries so things
    120 like ps and top can scan /proc more efficiently.</p>
    121 
    122 <a name="21-10-2016" /><a href="#21-10-2016"><hr><h2><b>October 21, 2016</b></h2></a>
    123 <blockquote><p>Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat,
    124 we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your
    125 own problem.</p><p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
    126 
    127 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.2</a>
    128 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.2>git commit</a>)
    129 is out.</p>
    130 
    131 <p>During this development cycle, Elliott Hughes <a href=http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com/2016/07/episode-53-adb-on-adb.html>got interviewed
    132 on the ADB podcast</a>
    133 and Rob Landley <a href=http://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-88/>got interviewed on Linux Luddites</a> (<a href=http://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-11/>again</a>).
    134 Both talk about toybox and many other things.
    135 The web page also grew a new <a href=faq.html>FAQ page</a>, currently with
    136 just the one.</p>
    137 
    138 <p>New comands added to defconfig are <b>tunctl</b>,
    139 <b>log</b>, <b>start</b>, <b>stop</b>, and <b>sendevent</b>.
    140 The commands <b>file</b> and <b>netstat</b> got promoted out of pending.
    141 Pending added <b>chrt</b>, <b>setfattr</b>, and <b>getfattr</b>, and saw
    142 a lot of cleanups to diffstat and dd but not enough to promote them to
    143 defconfig yet. A new toys/net directory was added, moving ifconfig, netcat,
    144 netstat, rfkill, and tunctl there so far.</p>
    145 
    146 <p><b>Upgrades</b>: All commands now parse --version when they understand
    147 --help, but "true" and "false" should now ignore their arguments entirely.
    148 We taught stat to handle "%12x" and "%.12x" printf-style escapes, which
    149 apparently other versions do. The ifconfig output now shows the interface's
    150 device driver. Added patch -d and --dry-run, wc can now do -cm together,
    151 find has a NOP -noleaf so scripts that use that don't break, add -c to md5sum
    152 and sha1sum. Elliott taught ps to treat extra aguments as additional -p
    153 pids, implemented xxd -s, did a number of upgrades to file (added -HL,
    154 support for ar files, improved ELF support to report android API level
    155 and stripped/not stripped and it no longer prints a guessed build ID type).
    156 Elliott also added optional build-time support for using openssl's
    157 assembly-optimized md5sum/sha1sum implementations (leading to a new
    158 <a href=design.html>design</a> policy on shared libraries).</p>
    159 
    160 <p><b>Bugfixes</b>: Too many fixes to "ps" and "touch" to list, from both
    161 Elliott and Rob. Rob taught sed to handle s/[[:space:]/]// type sequences
    162 properly, switched grep to a better
    163 workaround for <a href=https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17829>glibc bug 17829</a>, made sed -i preserve ownership when run as root,
    164 made du max out at 2 terabytes instead of 2 gigabytes on 32-bit systems
    165 (it was always designed to, but was missing a typecast),
    166 fixed the option parsing infrastructure (config options that remove command
    167 line options got the placeholders wrong), fix to printf for printing
    168 octal digits and handling the (posix-mandated) difference between %b and
    169 non-%b octal output, reading from "-" no longer closes stdin when done,
    170 netcat -L works with nommu (although it may need more portability work),
    171 and you can now "make test_scankey" if you want to. Several commands
    172 (stat, makedeves, chgrp, cp, find) handled user name lookup failure badly
    173 (stat was segfaulting if you interrogated a file belonging to a nonexistent
    174 user, "chown 12345 file" errored out if you didn't have that user
    175 in /etc/passwd... now they should all print/accept the number when
    176 appropriate). "LC_ALL=C ls -Cs --color" produces the same output
    177 as other versions (two spaces padding, -k hardwired on).<p>
    178 
    179 <p>Kyungsik Lee fixed a bug
    180 in cp (readlink() doesn't actually null terminate the string it reads in),
    181 Elliott Hughes made pgrep/pkill return success/failure, fixed trailing
    182 whitespace in netstat, fixed a SMACK symbol conflict due to linux/xattr.h
    183 changing, fixed ls -sh, and added a lot of
    184 stuff to the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap page</a>.
    185 Izabera pointed out cmp -l and -s can't be selected at the same time,
    186 that timeout was never actually checking -v, that ls should default to -q
    187 when output is to a tty, and that "file -" would sometimes try to open "-"
    188 instead of stdin.
    189 Usischev Yury pointed out a use after free error, and that id shouldn't
    190 call exit() directly. Matthias Urhahn pointed out that stat(2) returns
    191 hardwired 512-byte units, so stat.c was wrong. David Hedges pointed out
    192 that route could only handle 10 character interface names when the kernel
    193 can do 15 (it's still in pending for a reason, but fixed). Evgenii
    194 Stepanov found and helped diagnose one of the more subtle ps bugs fixed
    195 this time around.</p>
    196 
    197 <p>Calling "make test_blah" no longer causes make to error out if the last
    198 test fails (and thus returns a nonzero error code).
    199 Building single commands and the multiplexer used to require a "make clean"
    200 between them (because they had different config files both of which were older
    201 than generated/config.h so it didn't get rebuilt; now it just always
    202 rebuilds it).</p>
    203 
    204 <p>The defconfig build is now slightly less broken on older centos versions
    205 (although <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-September/008664.html>the consensus</a> is that Centos is just generally broken).<p>
    206 
    207 <p>Several commands were over-using xprintf(), which flushes its output
    208 to check for error (something you only need to do maybe once per line,
    209 and even then maybe only in loops because xexit() flushes and checks
    210 ferror() for you and adjusts the exit code if we wrote stuff to stdout
    211 that couldn't be printed). Lots of little flushes are inefficient,
    212 so most things can use normal printf(). (Retransmission
    213 of short writes is presumably libc's problem since it's buffering the
    214 output and all.)</p>
    215 
    216 <p><b>Library:</b>
    217 New library functions readlink0() and readlinkat0() which properly null
    218 terminates the symlink value (which the stock libc function inexplicably
    219 doesn't).
    220 The new do_lines() function interates reading lines from a filehandle
    221 and calling a function on each line.
    222 New function pollinate() factoring out netcat's poll() loop so things
    223 like telnet can use it.
    224 New functions getusername() and getgroupname() return a
    225 char * given a uid/gid (and return a string representation of the number
    226 if the lookup fails), and xgetpwnamid/xgetgrnamid were renamed to
    227 xgetuid/xgetgid and now return an integer instead of a struct (also helping
    228 handle lookup failures, you can still return the uid/get for "12345").</p>
    229 
    230 <p>Switched atolx() to use long long internally.
    231 Renamed xopen() to xopen_stdio() and made a new xopen() that never returns
    232 stdin, stdout, or stderr (duping /dev/null into the filehandles as necessary).
    233 New function xopenro() opens a file read only with one less argument, and
    234 understands that "-" means stdin. New flag WARN_ONLY tells these functions
    235 to just print a warning on failure, and return -1 instead of exiting.
    236 Misc new functions like openro() which defaults to the WARN_ONLY behavior
    237 and notstdio() which dup()s a filehandle up beyond stdin/out/err backfilling
    238 with /dev/null as necessary. The WARN_ONLY flag let us remove the failok
    239 argument from loopfiles().</p>
    240 
    241 <p>New TOYFLAG_NOHELP disables --help processing (which "true" and "false"
    242 should not do).</b>
    243 
    244 <p>The test suite now has NOSPACE=1 to ignore whitespace (using diff -b to
    245 check results), which helps TEST_HOST pass the same tests as toybox.
    246 Fixes to chattr and date tests. It also has a new variable $C with the
    247 absolute path to the command being tested (bypassing shell builtins),
    248 and a function testcmd() which is just like testing() except it prepends
    249 the command name ($C) to the test command line as well as the test
    250 description.</p>
    251 
    252 <a name="02-06-2016" /><a href="#02-06-2016"><hr><h2><b>June 2, 2016</b></h2></a>
    253 <blockquote><p>When the 'Drink' button is pressed it makes an instant but
    254 highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic
    255 analysis of the subject's metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental
    256 signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's
    257 brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows
    258 quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of
    259 liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.</p>
    260 <p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
    261 
    262 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.1</a>
    263 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.1>git commit</a>)
    264 is out. (Yes, I forgot to update the --version string, but I already
    265 uploaded the <a href=downloads/binaries/0.7.1>binaries</a>.)</p>
    266 
    267 <p>The website has https support now, you can "make cat ps ls"
    268 to get standalone commands (and "make list list_pending" to see what's
    269 available), and a whole lot of bugfixes and new options to existing
    270 commands.</p>
    271 
    272 <h2>New Commands</h2>
    273 <p>Rob implemented <b>ulimit</b>. In pending, Elliott Hughes implemented
    274 file. and Lipi Lee implemented a simple wget. (Pending also had minor
    275 cleanups to more and lsof, but no promotions this time around.)</p>
    276 
    277 <h2>New Options</h2>
    278 <p>Izabera implemented env -u, suggested adding seq -w, made factor
    279 use full unsigned 64 bit math even on 32 bit platforms, pointed out base64
    280 -w0 should disable wrapping, and sped up wc -c.
    281 Elliott Hughes added mount -o relatime, xxd -p -r, and od -w.
    282 Sameer Pradhan (or possibly Bilal Qureshi) suggested adding stat -tL -c %m%t%T.
    283 Tom Cherry added getprop -Z. Paul Barker added hostname -b and -F.
    284 Rob added ls -b, made ls -q work with utf8,
    285 made sed -f - read from stdin, and added top -O (like ps -O).</p>
    286 
    287 <p>Elliott and Rob <b>added Thread support to ps and top</b>,
    288 with -o TID, TNAME. We also added -o PCY (android scheduling policy),
    289 -o BIT (process is 32 or 64 bit), and -o TNAME now shows the parent
    290 command name for threads.</p>
    291 
    292 <h2>Documentation</h2>
    293 
    294 <p>Rob added the sed invocations to convert tabs/spaces and back to
    295 design.html. Isaac Dunham updated hexedit's help text.
    296 Jakob Flierl pointed out a broken URL in the README.</p>
    297 
    298 <p>Rob also redid the naming scheme of sed's pattern manipulation code to
    299 remove the gratuitous references to Roger Zelazny's "Amber" series, since it
    300 was confusing people.</p>
    301 
    302 <h2>Bugfixes</h2>
    303 
    304 <p>Grep -H and -n should now work properly with -ABC. Andy Chu pointed out an
    305 out of bounds access for zero length lines in rev, fixed a buffer overflow
    306 in diff -r, and fixed operator precedence in expr (although Rob is rewriting
    307 chunks of expr so toysh can use its plumbing for $(( )) ).
    308 Patrick Ohly fixed the too-aggressive suid permission dropping logic.
    309 Josh Gao fixed a segfault when find -iname got no argument, and
    310 made tail -f work right with just one file argument.
    311 Tom Marshall cleaned up tar's long filename support and improved
    312 the tar tests, and reported another find bug (with -iname -o -iname not
    313 tracking copy lifetimes properly) that got fixed.</p>
    314 
    315 <p>Elliott Hughes fixed wc -c to not trust zero length files to actually be
    316 zero length (/proc does that), fixed "mount -o rw,remount /system" on
    317 Android, removed trailing spaces on ps -o cmdline, fixed pkill -9 and
    318 the corresponding tests, made "insmod -" work, fixed top -b and tail -NUM,
    319 pointed out that ps shouldn't trim numeric fields for display size limits,
    320 and added some more
    321 explicit "sort" calls to make pipelines so build tempfiles are easier to cache.
    322 Rob <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/32b3587af261>fixed an insane sed thing</a> the perl 5.22 build was doing.
    323 Fixed mount -o to properly pass in leftover string data, and
    324 <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2016-March/004790.html>documented how to use toybox to mount nfs</a> (warning: kernel patch
    325 to fix some bitrot in the kernel NFS driver's string parsing attached
    326 to that message).</p>
    327 
    328 <p>George Burgess IV corrected some variable types in traceroute.
    329 Base64 now wraps == properly. Fixed two bzcat segfaults reported by
    330 John Regehr. Andy Chu found a segfault in "sed -e 'c\'" with no trailing
    331 line, and implemented mv -n and cp -n. The cyanogenmod guys pointed out that
    332 cp -a shouldn't complain if a non-root user can't chown, and we added
    333 the output path to cp -r error messages while we were there (before was just
    334 the filename).</p>
    335 
    336 <p>Samuel Holland fixed blkid's handling of vfat labels, and
    337 fixed a segfault when basename was passed an empty string and an empty
    338 suffix. Davis Mosenkovs fixed touch -t seconds parsing.
    339 Rob fixed a bunzip bug reported by John Regehr (the bad CRC
    340 error message was printing a NUL argument).</p>
    341 
    342 <p>Not all of the commands build standalone, but more of them do now;
    343 scripts/single.sh can now build a "mv" that isn't actually "cp".
    344 The dependencies are more granualr, so "make top; make ps" no longer
    345 produces a broken ps that ignores -A (because ps.o wasn't getting rebuilt
    346 even though top had the FLAG macros for -A zeroed).</p>
    347 
    348 <h2>Build</h2>
    349 <p>Rob added a <b>warning when building commands out of
    350 pending</b>. (The pending directory is full of code that hasn't been
    351 properly vetted. Use at your own risk.)</p>
    352 
    353 <p><b>New build targets let you build individual commands by name</b>, ala
    354 "make ls cat ps", and you can run the test suite for each standalone
    355 command with "make test_ls" and such.
    356 "make list" shows all such standalone commands in defconfig, and
    357 "make list_pending" shows unfinished commands from toys/pending
    358 ("make list list_pending" shows both together). "make clean" now deletes
    359 these filenames at the top level, and the corresponding unstripped files
    360 live in the directory generated/unstripped.</p>
    361 
    362 <p>Nicholas Boichat suggested switching make.sh to use $! for process
    363 enumeration during parallel builds (which is both more efficient and more
    364 portable), and suggested shell builtin replacements for wc/awk/sed so the
    365 build loop has fewer forks now.</p>
    366 
    367 <p>Lots of work on the test suite, much of it due to Andy Chu. It now
    368 consistently prints the name of the command being tested at the start of each
    369 test (and the common infrastructure does that, not each individual test), and
    370 "make tests" actually runs all the available tests now.
    371 Seperated pgrep and pkill tests, split lsattr/chattr, added fstype and base64
    372 tests. The "tests/files" directory now collects files for tests to
    373 use, with blkid, bzcat, and utf8 subdirectories: the $FILES variable
    374 gives a path to it, so "$FILES/blkid/ext2.bz2" and so on.
    375 The testsuite now has test files with 3 different types of "not utf8 output"
    376 sequences that require escaping, plus some combining character torture
    377 tests, direction reversals, and so on.</p>
    378 
    379 <p>Added dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK to various pending commands that need
    380 nommu conversion (which should fix the allyesconfig build).</p>
    381 
    382 <p>Static builds with selinux should work again.</p>
    383 
    384 <h2>Library</h2>
    385 
    386 <p>New bufgetgrgid() and bufgetpwuid() functions cache previous lookup info
    387 rather than repeatedly traversing /etc/passwd and /etc/group (which is slow).
    388 Added xpipe() to lib to catch pipe creation failure.
    389 The HELP_ macros generated by config2help.c now use a capital prefix
    390 to avoid collicing with help_exit() and such.</p>
    391 
    392 <p>The dirtree infrastructure got a cleanup pass in preparation for adding
    393 infinite recursion depth support (needed by rm -r), updated the
    394 <a href=code.html#ib_dirtree>documentation</a> to describe the new
    395 semantics (removing dirtree_start() and adding dirtree_flagread()).
    396 Now dirtree_recurse() takes the new dirfd as an argument.</p>
    397 
    398 <p>Split out _xexit() from xexit() and let sigatexit() set multiple
    399 callbacks.</p>
    400 
    401 <p>For years the man pages have said to #include <sys/types.h> to get
    402 major/minor/makedev but now that glibc
    403 <a href=https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-11/msg00253.html>has vowed
    404 to break existing programs</a> and replace it with another nonstandard header
    405 not in posix or lsb, we added our own functions to lib/ to do the transform
    406 ourselves (based on what the kernel actually expects).</p>
    407 
    408 <h2>Portability</h2>
    409 
    410 <p>Debian unstable started needing an extra header #include for some reason, and
    411 although printf("%.*s", INT_MAX, s) worked fine on Ubuntu 12.04 it
    412 didn't on 14.04, so added a workaround for that. Typecast a printf because
    413 wchar_t isn't a rigidly defined size. RLIMIT_RTTIME was
    414 added to the kernel in 2008 but you can't expect uClibc to have noticed yet,
    415 nor did it #define MS_RELATIME (added in 2006), or prlimit (2010)...
    416 (Given the improvements in musl and bionic, uClibc support may be dropped
    417 in a future release.) Given that the xattr functions were added during
    418 linux 2.5, we can #include its header unconditionally.</p>
    419 
    420 <p>Renamed basename_r() to something else to avoid conflicting with freebsd's
    421 libc, and both scripts/install.h and scripts/config2help.c no longer include
    422 toys.h (to make cross-compiling from systems we don't run on easier).</p>
    423 
    424 <p>Debian bug 635570 did something unspeakably nonportable, depending on
    425 "sed -e 'a\'" (with no next line of the pattern, so an unterminated
    426 continuation) to add a newline to the last line of input if and only if
    427 that last line of the input didn't have a newline, and to take no other
    428 action. This is well into "depending on a bug" territory, but we implemented
    429 it because otherwise Debian's install broke. (Of course this behavior
    430 is undocumented, non-obvious, and doesn't really make logical sense.)</p>
    431 
    432 <p>CONFIG_TOYBOX_NORECURSE now disables the stack measuring logic (which
    433 was giving some "security" code fits). Also we typecast pointers to (long)
    434 before comparing them to avoid spurious compiler "optimizations" that
    435 break the code.</p>
    436 
    437 <a name="02-02-2016" /><a href="#02-02-2016"><hr><h2><b>February 2, 2016</b></h2></a>
    438 <blockquote><p>"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that
    439 quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with
    440 you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
    441 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
    442 
    443 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.7.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.7.0</a>
    444 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.7.0>git commit</a>)
    445 is out.</p>
    446 
    447 <p>The new commands in defconfig are <b>iotop</b>, <b>top</b>, <b>pgrep</b>,
    448 and <b>pkill</b>
    449 (most replacing corresponding versions from pending). Added grep -ABC,
    450 swapon -d (discard), mkswap -L (label) and UUID support, and find -delete.
    451 Izabera added free -h and unshare -f. Josh Gao implemented tail -f.
    452 Jose Bollo submitted cp --preserve=context,attr. Kylie McClain added
    453 mktemp -u.</p>
    454 
    455 <p>In pending there's the start of a vi command, and Sameer Pradhan contributed
    456 a new dhcp6. This cycle saw several rounds of route cleanup and a little dhcp
    457 cleanup, but neither are complete yet. Lipi Lee did some cleanup to netstat.c
    458 and Elliott Hughes removed warnings from traceroute.</p>
    459 
    460 <p>Lots of updates to ps: several new -o options, -k (--sort) -O and -M,
    461 improved compatibility with Android's historical behavior, and
    462 extensive internal code cleanup (including the removal of all
    463 the magic constants).</p>
    464 
    465 <h3><b>Website</b></h3>
    466 
    467 <p>Dreamhost restored the <a href="#12-21-2015">missing 11 months</a>
    468 to the mailing list archive, in the process deleting the month after
    469 that. Now they've asked if I have mbox files archiving the new
    470 gap (between December 20, 2015 to January 21, 2016, and presumably they
    471 could also fill in the gap from December 14, 2014 to January 3, 2015 that's
    472 been there since the last time they did this),
    473 but due to some gmail filtering I've
    474 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2012.html#15-10-2012>never
    475 been able to disable</a>, my copy of those files is spread among 3 different
    476 mbox files I'd have to sort/filter/collate. (It's on the todo list.)</p>
    477 
    478 <p>Added a code of conduct to the README (we're
    479 <a href=https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource/code-of-conduct>borrowing twitter's</a>) because somebody
    480 made it necessary.</p>
    481 
    482 <h3><b>Bugfixes</b></h3>
    483 <p>Fixed another sed bug where any ] right after [ was skipped (not just the
    484 first one in the range, so [[] didn't terminate). Fixed sort -f and added test cases.
    485 Assume 80 columns in "ls -m | cat", ls -L is no longer backwards,
    486 and ls of files with no paths no longer uses an uninitialized (zero) dirfd.
    487 Several bugfixes
    488 to find (Gilad Arnold fixed -perm, Daniel K. Levy fixed "find . -exec echo {}",
    489 and while we're there I fixed find --prune, made "find . -execdir
    490 echo {} + -execdir ls {} +" work, and ripped out the environment size
    491 measuring code that checked for a 128k limit removed back in linux 2.6.22).
    492 Elliott Hughes fixed the date command's parsing of 4 digit
    493 years and documented the %s escape, fixed hwclock -u, and pointed out
    494 that runcon needs to exec to do its job (not recursively call another
    495 command_main() in the same process). Tom Marshall reported that blkid was
    496 handling ext2 wrong. Mike Moreton corrected cpio extraction's uid and gid
    497 values, and added a --no-preserve-owner option. Fixed the SUID permission
    498 dropping logic (which was a bit over-zealous, preventing some commands from
    499 running at all).</p>
    500 
    501 <p>I'm told that debian-testing broke its libc so the nsenter build breaks,
    502 but my attempts to install the debian-testing network cd image under
    503 qemu keep breaking. Maybe someday they'll fix it enough I can actually
    504 reproduce the problem. (Debootstrap under unbuntu builds an ubuntu-flavored
    505 chroot in which toybox builds fine.)</p>
    506 
    507 <h3><b>Documentation</b></h3>
    508 <p>Rewrite of the about.html page, tweaks to design.html, and a re-triage of
    509 sbase in roadmap.html. Update to mkstatus.py to collate multiple span
    510 tags with the same id, resulting in a larger status.html page (which
    511 was previously ignoring some commands in the roadmap).</p>
    512 
    513 <p>Expanded the defconfig/allyesconfig/allnoconfighelp text in "make help"
    514 to explain what they're for.</p>
    515 
    516 <h3><b>infrastructure</b></h3>
    517 <ul>
    518 <li><p>Expanded toys.optargs to 64 bits so a command can have more than 32 options.</p></li>
    519 <li><p>Added NOEXIT() wrapper to turn xwrap() functions into warning versions
    520 using the existing longjump(toys.rebound) infrastructure.</p></li>
    521 <li><p>Renamed dirtree->data to dirfd and stopped storing symlink length
    522 into it (this fixed a bug where following symlinks to directories
    523 didn't give a valid directory filehandle, noticeable with ls -Z).</p></li>
    524 <li><p>New TAGGED_ARRAY() infrastructure generates index and bitmask macros
    525 for arrays of structures starting with a name string.</p></li>
    526 <li><p>New lib/linestack.c for utf8 fontmetrics (draw_str() and utf8len()
    527 and so on), and for tracking multiple lines of text
    528 (vi, less, shell history) that need wordwrapping and scrolling up/down.</p></li>
    529 <li><p>Upgrades to lib/interestingtimes.c: scan_key() now has a timeout
    530 in miliseconds and recognizes more sequences including ANSI
    531 window size probes. New utf8 test files in tests/files/utf8 including
    532 sequence reversing, stacked combining chars, and all three types of
    533 unprintable sequences (low ascii <32 ala ^X, invalid utf8 sequences ala
    534 <AB><CD>, and invalid unicode code points ala U+1234).</p></li>
    535 <li><p>More comma handling code in lib.c: comma_args()</p></li>
    536 <li><p>Added error_msg_raw() to shut up fortify's endless static checking false
    537 positives.</p></li>
    538 <li><p>readfileat() can now realloc() in a loop to read long files
    539 ("zcat | insmod" needed it).</p></li>
    540 </ul>
    541 
    542 <h3><b>Roadmap</b></h3>
    543 <p>We're getting close to having a self-hosting development environment
    544 using toybox for the command line. The remaining busybox commands in
    545 <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> are:</p>
    546 
    547 <blockquote><p><b>
    548 awk bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip gzip
    549 less ping route sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi wget xzcat zcat
    550 </b></p></blockquote>
    551 
    552 <p>And the remaining non-busybox commands in Aboriginal Linux's build/host
    553 directory (from the distcc, genext2fs, e2fsprogs, zlib, and squashfs packagesi)
    554 are:</p>
    555 
    556 <blockquote><p><b>
    557 mke2fs fsck.ext2 resize2fs distcc genext2fs unsquashfs distccd mksquashfs tune2fs
    558 </b></p></blockquote>
    559 
    560 <p>Squashfs and distcc are probably out of scope for toybox, but mke2fs,
    561 fsck.ext2, resize2fs, genext2fs, and tune2fs should all be added to the
    562 above "busybox" replacement list.</p>
    563 
    564 <p>Remind me to include this countdown in future releases. Once they've all
    565 been replaced, the next goal is <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>building AOSP under itself</a>.</p>
    566 
    567 <p>See the full <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> and <a href=status.html>status</a>
    568 pages for more details.</p>
    569 
    570 <a name="12-21-2015" /><a href="#12-21-2015"><hr><h2><b>December 21, 2015</b></h2></a>
    571 
    572 <p>Yes, 11 months have gone missing from the mailing list web archive.</p>
    573 
    574 <p>Yesterday evening Dreamhost's mailman server went down (timing out trying
    575 to connect). I poked them about it, they
    576 <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/678781271670149121>blamed
    577 DNS</a>, I explained that the hang was _after_ the DNS lookup and
    578 entered the dig info into the trouble ticket showing the IPs the DNS
    579 queries were returning, they reinstalled the server at that IP from what I
    580 assume was their most recent backup, and that's how 11 months of messages
    581 vanished out of the archive.</p>
    582 
    583 <p>I've <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/679114451975467008>continued to poke them about it</a> but I honestly believe that's the best they
    584 can do. <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>Last time</a>
    585 this sort of thing <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>happened</a>
    586 we went back and forth for months, so I added a link to a backup web
    587 archive (in the nav bar on the left) that isn't controlled by dreamhost,
    588 and thus doesn't gratuitously lose data on a regular basis. (I note
    589 the earlier hole in Dreamhost's archive was never fixed either. That
    590 was data never getting archived, this is a year's worth of data that
    591 was in the archive until yesterday vanishing after the fact.)</p>
    592 
    593 <p>If you're wondering why the <a href=http://lists.landley.net>top level</a>
    594 list page has been "temporarily disabled" for multiple years now... you'd have
    595 to ask Dreamhost. I know I have. More than a dozen times.</p>
    596 
    597 <a name="03-11-2015" /><a href="#03-11-2015"><hr><h2><b>November 3, 2015</b></h2></a>
    598 <blockquote><p>"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm
    599 not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity
    600 of Betelgeuse?" Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way. "I don't know," he
    601 said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you think it's the sort of thing you're
    602 likely to say?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
    603 
    604 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.1</a>
    605 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.1>git commit</a>)
    606 is out.</p>
    607 
    608 <p>We have a new <b>ps</b> command with all the -o fields posix wants (although
    609 it doesn't accept BSD non-dash option syntax yet), and <b>bunzip2</b> (not just
    610 bzcat but the proper extract-in-place command).
    611 Sameer Pradhan added <b>hostid</b> and <b>fsync</b>.
    612 Elliott Hughes added <b>flock</b>.
    613 
    614 <p>The people waiting for <b>human readable number support</b> (du -hH, ls -h,
    615 and so on) can thank Elliott Hughes for implementing it. (Our output doesn't
    616 exactly match others' because we our "binary" mode will say 1.0G instead of
    617 1024M, which is a bug in the other one we didn't emulate.)</p>
    618 
    619 <p>The other big news is <b>nommu support</b>, tested on the new
    620 <a href=http://nommu.org/jcore>jcore</a> processor but presumaby working
    621 on any nommu system. A few commands don't support nommu yet, but those
    622 are disabled by dependencies on TOYBOX_FORK in menuconfig when building
    623 for nommu. The roadmap now has a large section analyzing the uClinux
    624 project (note that <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a> is slowly replacing
    625 <a href=http://uclinux.org>uclinux.org</a> as the standard repository of
    626 all knowledge and wisdom about nommu. The old site <a href=#12-02-2012>contains
    627 much that is apocryphal</a>, or at least wildly inaccurate, and the new one
    628 is trying to improve on that).</p>
    629 
    630 <p>Both "make change" and scripts/single.sh (for building standalone commands
    631 without the multiplexer logic) now use the top level .config
    632 for toybox global settings such as Linux Security Blanket Module selection,
    633 (so make defconfig before change now).</p>
    634 
    635 <p>Documentation updates to the <a href=code.html>code</a> and
    636 <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> pages.</p>
    637 
    638 <h3>pending</h3>
    639 
    640 <p>In the pending directory Sameer Pradhan added tftp,
    641 and Elliott Hughes sent lsof. Isaac Dunham upgraded mdev,
    642 reboot, init, login, and modprobe, and fixed a distro-specific build break in
    643 scripts/mkflags.h. Elliott Hughes and Lipi Lee made netstat -p handle
    644 command lines longer than 21 characters, and Elliott fixed netstat -e and
    645 some build warnings. Yeongdeok Suh fixed a warning in dhcpd.
    646 I started cleanup on pgrep/pkill.</p>
    647 
    648 <h3>Command updates, bugfixes, and infrastructure</h3>
    649 
    650 <p>The multiplexer's "command not found" error exit is now 127, so now you can't
    651 distinguish between a command not being found in the multiplexer and
    652 the multiplexer itself not being found by the shell, because people wanted
    653 that for some reason.</p>
    654 
    655 <p>Elliott Hughes made date reject invalid dates rather
    656 than set the clock to something weird (setting the clock 100 years into the
    657 future makes most Linux desktops surprisingly unhappy, and ntpdate won't fix it
    658 either), fixed several ls -l display issues (user/group field ordering,
    659 make user/group/lsmcontext left aligned), did the aforementioned
    660 extensive work on human readable number output, fixed ionice's default
    661 class, fixed a mv overwrite bug, made df's columns auto-size, added
    662 --ppid and -Z to ps, and teamed up with Daniel K. Levy to fix
    663 a segfault in find's handling of -newer -group or -user.</p>
    664 
    665 <p>Hyejin Kim added stat -c %T support. Colin Cross worked
    666 on vmstat fixing
    667 a header printing bug and calculating the bi and bo columns in the right
    668 units. Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra
    669 newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed.
    670 Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain
    671 pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax.
    672 Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows
    673 all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p>
    674 
    675 <p>Isabella Parakiss reported that sed -e "/x/c\" -e "y" added an extra
    676 newline and that grep -w '\(x\)\1' didn't work, both now fixed.
    677 Alistair Strachan fixed several problems with switch_root. Kylie McClain
    678 pointed out env should be able to clear variables via NAME= syntax.
    679 Dima Krasner added support for running blkid without a partition (so it shows
    680 all partitions). Hyejin Kim sent in a bunch of static analysis bug reports.</p>
    681 
    682 <p>Two large thinko fixes in oneit: -3 was always enabled (which would
    683 eventually block if the child never read the exiting PID numbers from its file
    684 descriptor #3 until the pipe filled up), and the signal handlers weren't
    685 set up right (for requesting semi-graceful halt/poweroff/reboot).
    686 Calling install without a mode is now 0755, and install -g 0 no longer clashes
    687 with cp --preserve. Better error message for ls -r on unreadable
    688 directories, and ls -Z now uses O_PATH (with the /proc/self/fd/%d
    689 workaround for kernel stupidity as necessary).</p>
    690 
    691 <p>Date now understands @unixtime[.fraction] and uses -D for
    692 the set-side format (matching busybox's extension for this). The seq -f
    693 string now checks that it's got exactly one %f escape with the correct
    694 attributes (and a whole bunch of test cases for it). Fixed a bug
    695 in od that screwed up the position indicator on arm and mips.
    696 In stat the d/h units moved from %d %D to the default string.
    697 And patch can now correctly apply hunks with trailing context to the start of
    698 the file.</p>
    699 
    700 <p>The prompt argument moved out of yesno() (the caller can print the prompt
    701 themselves). Replaced toys.exithelp with help_exit(). Added new
    702 XVFORK() macro, and xpopen_both() calls /proc/self/exe when passed
    703 a NULL argv (see cpio -p for example usage). Replaced toys.recurse
    704 with toys.stacktop so the recurse or re-exec decision is now based
    705 on bytes of stack space used. Marked a bunch of command-local functions
    706 static.</p>
    707 
    708 <p>New additions to lib/ include strlower(), xconnect(), and the
    709 aforementioned help_exit().
    710 The testsuite now has some infrastructure tests based on "example"
    711 commands such as toys/examples/test_human_readable.c.
    712 The login command finally got a long-overdue cleanup (it's one of the
    713 commands that predate the "pending" directory but were part of the reason
    714 for it). Hexedit had an
    715 uninitialized variable (of course gcc didn't spot it, it was too busy
    716 warning about "may be used uninitialized but never actually is" variables).</p>
    717 
    718 <p>Tweaked makefile so
    719 "make CROSS_COMPILE=prefix-" (as well as "CROSS_COMPILE=prefix- make",
    720 which still works). Toybox is now installed chmod -w so broken installers
    721 (like the bunzip2 package's) that try to overwrite existing binaries won't
    722 knock out the whole of toybox.
    723 GCC 5.2.0 stopped being able to compile Linux 2.6.12's kconfig, but
    724 we added a workaround. You can now build uptime without utmpx.h.
    725 Alejandro Joya pointed out that enabling smack required smack on the host
    726 as well as target when cross compiling, which is now fixed.</p>
    727 
    728 <p>Note: toybox can autodetect nommu support when building with a uClibc
    729 toolchain such as <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/downloads/binaries/old/1.4.3/cross-compiler-sh2eb.tar.gz>the one from Aboriginal Linux</a>,
    730 but <a href=http://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>with musl-libc</a>
    731 you'll have to enable CONFIG_TOYBOX_MUSL_NOMMU_IS_BROKEN to work around the
    732 fact they provide a non-functional fork() implementation that always returns
    733 -ENOSYS, to prevent you from compile-time probing for nommu support when
    734 cross-compiling. Unfortunately "preventing you from probing" seems to be
    735 an explicit policy with musl, they also don't provide an "#ifdef __MUSL__"
    736 because their library is perfect and you're only ever allowed to work around
    737 other people's bugs, not theirs. So we have to use menuconfig to manually
    738 enable musl-specific bug workarounds.</p>
    739 
    740 <a name="23-07-2015" /><a href="#23-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2015</b></h2></a>
    741 <p>I recreated the <a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>0.6.0 source tarball</a>
    742 (new sha1sum 08fb1c23f520c25a15f262a8a95ea5b676a98d54)
    743 because I forgot to add --prefix to the git archive command when I updated
    744 my release script from mercurial, so the files weren't in an enclosing
    745 directory. (Ooops.)</p>
    746 
    747 <a name="19-07-2015" /><a href="#19-07-2015"><hr><h2><b>July 19, 2015</b></h2></a>
    748 <blockquote><p>
    749 The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic
    750 component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar
    751 hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it
    752 around in." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy </p></blockquote>
    753 
    754 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.6.0.tar.gz>Toybox 0.6.0</a>
    755 (<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.6.0>git commit</a>)
    756 is out. (Yes, git. See the <a href=#05-04-2015>previous news entry</a>.)</p>
    757 
    758 <p>Sorry for the unusually long gap between releases. Since last release Ye
    759 Olde Project Maintainer traveled to japan twice and had two more "once
    760 a century" floods at home. (Probably a coincidence.) Still catching up.</p>
    761 
    762 <h3><b>CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article</b></h3>
    763 
    764 <p>I gave another State Of The Toybox talk
    765 (<a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04XwAbtPmAg>video</a>
    766 <a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2015.txt>outline</a>), in which I
    767 repeat my <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#07-11-2013>perennial</a>
    768 <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/557309224535851009>complaint</a>
    769 that Wikipedia[citation needed]
    770 <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox>still</a>
    771 <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#Controversy_over_Toybox>says</a>
    772 toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why
    773 the hiatus ended.</p>
    774 
    775 <p>Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the
    776 <a href=#15-11-2011>most</a>
    777 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/log/tip/LICENSE>basic</a>
    778 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011>research</a> on
    779 this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years,
    780 I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox
    781 came out of mothballs in November 2011 <b>because</b> it could be
    782 relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already
    783 filling with a 10 year headstart.</p>
    784 
    785 <a name="asterisk_back" />
    786 <p>The article has plenty of smaller issues<a href=#asterisk>*</a>, but
    787 given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013
    788 (<a href=http://landley.net/talks/ohio-2013.txt>outline</a>,
    789 <a href=https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3>audio</a>) on why I switched away from GPL for
    790 my projects, that one bugs me.</p>
    791 
    792 <h3><b>New stuff this release</b></h3>
    793 
    794 <p>There's a new android menu in menuconfig, and rather a lot of Linux
    795 Security Module support (Smack for Tizen from Xavier Roche and Jos Bollo,
    796 and SELinux for Android from Elliott Hughes; see
    797 the Security Blanket menu under global settings in menuconfig) has
    798 trickled in, although there's still more to come.</p>
    799 
    800 <p><b>New commands:</b> Added reset, nproc, ionice, and iorenice.
    801 Elliott Hughes contributed xxd, runcon,
    802 restorecon, load_policy, getenforce, setenforce, getprop, and setprop.
    803 Promoted shred, nsenter, and hwclock.</p>
    804 
    805 <p>You can once again build catv now the flag infrastructure's been updated to
    806 let it coexist with cat -v.
    807 And on a long plane flight I wrote
    808 hexedit, an interactive hex editor that implements the start of
    809 cursor control infrastructure (for eventual use by less and vi and shell
    810 command history and so on).</p>
    811 
    812 <p><b>New options:</b> Added sed -E as a BSD-compatible synonym for -r.
    813 Upgraded oneit with -r (restart), -3 (send exiting PID values to child),
    814 and signal handling. Added -v option to timeout, -m to mknod, -u to shred,
    815 -t to dmesg, and -123 to head and tail. Added implicit "." to grep -r without
    816 any files to work on. Hyejin Kim requested prefix support for truncate -s.
    817 Greg Hackman added -inum to find.
    818 Jan Cybulski added the smack side of ls -Z support. Various patches also
    819 added -Z to mkdir, mknod, and mkfifo.
    820 Basic cp --preserve support went in, but not yet the xattr/LSM parts.</p>
    821 
    822 <p>The toybox command now has a --version option,
    823 which uses "git describe" if available.</p>
    824 
    825 <p><b>Build infrastructure:</b>
    826 The "make change" target now saves the output of each failed standalone
    827 command build in a .bad file, and "make defconfig" is quieter now.</p>
    828 
    829 <p>Paul Barker submitted a large patch changing command install paths so
    830 "toybox can be installed alongside busybox without confusing
    831 update-alternatives". (There's some argument over
    832 what the right paths should be, and I'm waiting for
    833 people to tell me what else needs fixing because I have no idea. I've
    834 been symlinking /bin to /usr/bin since 2002
    835 <a href=http://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf>for
    836 historical reasons</a>.)</p>
    837 
    838 <p><b>Docs:</b> The repository link now goes to github, with another link
    839 to the commit rss feed.</p>
    840 
    841 <p>Elliott Hughes updated the Android section of the roadmap
    842 (and he would know). Redid bits of scripts/mkstatus.py to make updating
    843 status.html easier, and the README is larger.</p>
    844 
    845 <p>More description of option parsing in code.html, which now describes the
    846 FLAG_x macros, switching flag macro sets with FOR_newcommand, how
    847 configuration zeroes flag macros and using FORCE_FLAGS to suppress the
    848 zeroing of options shared between commands. Also added description of ";"
    849 to make --longopts take an optional =value part, and more about TOYBOX_DEBUG
    850 to check NEWTOY() option strings (otherwise a bad option string makes
    851 lib/args.c obviously segfault, but doesn't explain why).</p>
    852 
    853 <p>Added a "Why 0BSD?" section to license.html when submitting zero clause bsd
    854 to SPDX (according to the pending license spreadsheet, it's been approved for
    855 SPDX 2.2).</p>
    856 
    857 <p>The old list of commands needing cleanup but not in pending was
    858 removed from toys/pending/README and instead the issues were added
    859 as TODO comments in the individual commands.</p>
    860 
    861 <p><b>Bugfixes:</b>
    862 Fixed mount -a segfaulting without -O (reported by Janus Troelsen),
    863 and made it try a "become rw" ioctl() on the block device before falling
    864 back to mounting read only (because Android expects that).
    865 Fixed printf -- and printf ---. Lots of tweaks to ls -l spacing with
    866 different options. Make touch -d and -t actually set time when you don't
    867 specify nanoseconds.
    868 Fixed a subtle bug where recursive calls (toybox commands that run other
    869 toybox commands) weren't resetting all their state. (This manifested as
    870 a "no }" error from "find | xargs sed", but could cause other problems.)
    871 And David Halls reported another sed bug trying to compile libiconv (which
    872 left extra \ at the start of lines in a generated shell script, breaking
    873 the build). Output an error message for "cat /mnt".</p>
    874 
    875 <p>Kylie McClain reported that mktemp broke when $TMPDIR was set to an empty
    876 string (which is not the same as unset), that install/find didn't support
    877 numeric uid/gids, and that sort -z affects both input and output.
    878 Isabella Parakiss fixed a printf.c bug.
    879 David Halls fixed bugs in install -D and find -exec. Samuel Holland
    880 fixed unshare -r. Hyejin Kim fixed makedevs with a count of 1, fold -w
    881 range checking, an error path in scripts/mkflags.c, added -i to dhcpd,
    882 and stopped su from prompting the root user for the new user's password.
    883 Jan Cybulski spotted wrong indentation when combining ls -s and -i with -C and
    884 -x. Jos Bollo fixed stat %G. Sameer Pradhan fixed a bug in mkfifo -Z.</p>
    885 
    886 <p>Elliott Hughes asked for a default SIGPIPE handler to disable
    887 the signal handler bionic's dynamic loader installs (yes really). Still not
    888 100% sure what the correct behavior is there. (Posix is
    889 (<a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.standards.posix.austin.general/10915>actively unhelpful</a>, but at least they're taking
    890 <a href=http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=789#c1976>years to
    891 make up their mind</a>. Elliott also sent patches to fix a typo in
    892 useradd.test, add missing arguments to error_exit() calls and clean up
    893 printf() format strings, fix an off by one error in human_readable(),
    894 fix dmesg -c error reporting, fix a segfault in comma_scan where the option
    895 was the last item in optlist (triggered by mount -o ro,remount), fix
    896 hwclock -w, made ifconfig print lowercase MAC addresses (it was bothering
    897 him), and make terminal_size() read the right environment variable
    898 (LINES, not ROWS). And he suggested the test suite notice high command exit
    899 values (corresponding to segfault or other signals).</p>
    900 
    901 <p>People are apparently using toys/pending commands, despite the police tape
    902 and flashing lights, so added louder warnings to toys/pending/README.
    903 Elliott Hughes fixed various problems with tar, dd, more, and top.
    904 Hyejin Kim cleaned up syslogd and dumpleases. Isaac Dunham added hotplug
    905 support to mdev. Yeongdeok Suh added RFC-3315 ipv6 support to dhcpd.</p>
    906 
    907 <p>I rewrote ps.c from scratch (in pending), but it's not ready for real use
    908 yet.</p>
    909 
    910 <p><b>Portability:</b>
    911 On the portability front Bernhard Rosenkranzer fixed a problem where the
    912 menuconfig code wouldn't compile in C99 mode. (This led to me documenting
    913 the craptacular nature of kconfig in a README, and the plan to replace it
    914 sometime before 1.0.) Some extra flags to shut up overzealous llvm warnings
    915 were added (and have to be probed for because gcc complains about
    916 arguments it doesn't recognize even when they switch stuff _off_ using
    917 a standard syntax). Don't depend on malloc(0) to return non-null in ls.
    918 David Halls fixed some mac/ios portability issues,
    919 implying somebody's built at least part of toybox on a mac.</p>
    920 
    921 <p>Added basename_r() to lib/lib.c because the posix semantics for basename()
    922 are stupid but what the gnu guys did to it was appalling.
    923 Turns out bionic already had a basename_r(), but posix still doesn't.
    924 Fixed it up in portability.h, but this
    925 could break more stuff in future. (Correct fix is to lobby posix to add it,
    926 which would probably take about 15 years...)</p>
    927 
    928 <p><b>Infrastructure:</b>
    929 The build now checks $LDFLAGS for linker-only flags, and allows the strip
    930 command to fail (binflt toolchains provide a strip that doesn't work).
    931 Since time.c uses floating point, added TOYBOX_FLOAT dependency in config.</p>
    932 
    933 <p>There's a lib/lsm.h defining varous inline functions for linux
    934 security modules stuff, if (lsm_enabled()) should turn into a compile-time
    935 constant 0 and let code drop out when TOYBOX_LSM_NONE selected, but
    936 testing against CFG_TOYBOX_LSM_NONE or derived symbols is still useful
    937 becuase when it _is_ enabled the probe turns into a system call you
    938 don't want to repeat too much.</p>
    939 
    940 <p>Switched a bunch of commands from signal() to xsignal(). Factored out
    941 xgetgrnamid() and xgetpwnamid() into xwrap.c. Make time.c depend on
    942 TOYBOX_FLOAT (since it always uses float so shouldn't be available on
    943 build targets without even software float). Added readfileat() to lib/lib.c.</p>
    944 
    945 <p>The dirtree infrastructure now passes in full flags for the old symlink
    946 field, and the new DIRTREE_SHUTUP flag disables warnings if a file vanishes
    947 out from under you during traverse. New dirtree_start() wrapper to
    948 create dirtree root with only two arguments.</p>
    949 
    950 <p>The not-curses infrastructure introduced by hexedit mostly moved to
    951 lib/interestingtimes.c.</p>
    952 
    953 <a name="asterisk" />
    954 <a href="#asterisk_back" />Asterisk:</a> such when
    955 Tim contacted me (my blog says a couple days before nov 13, 2011, I.E.
    956 11/11/11 not some specific day 2 months later) to ask if I wanted to work
    957 on a new project he was proposing called
    958 <a href=http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement_project>BentoBox</a>
    959 (because I used to do busybox, he'd forgotten toybox existed
    960 until I brought it up). And don't ask me what "focuses not on compatibility
    961 with its GNU counterparts" means when CP_MORE adds 7 non-posix options
    962 and toys/other has 84 commands in neither posix nor LSB. I think they're
    963 struggling to explain the difference having dismissed "licensing" as being
    964 the reason it started up again after a long hiatus? The reason I don't think
    965 GNU is special is there are a half-dozen other independent
    966 implementations of the same unix command tools out there (AT&amp;T,
    967 BSD, Coherent, Minix, plan 9, busybox, toybox, and several more analyzed in
    968 the <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a>, and that's ignoring the implementations
    969 written for DOS or in assembly over the years). But I do care what
    970 Linux From Scratch expects, and if it's
    971 <a href=http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-museum/7.6/LFS-BOOK-7.6-NOCHUNKS.html#ch-tools-gcc-pass1>calling mv -v</a>
    972 then I impelement mv -v
    973 even if <a href=http://landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html>posix hasn't got
    974 it</a>. And I don't know why "gnu counterparts" would describe this when
    975 util-linux isn't a gnu package, nor are info-zip, e2fsprogs, kmod, less,
    976 procps, shadow, sysklogd, vim, zlib, sudo, dhcpcd...</p>
    977 
    978 <a name="05-04-2015" /><a href="#05-04-2015"><hr><h2><b>April 5, 2015</b></h2></a>
    979 <p>Since <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/>android</a> and
    980 <a href=https://git.tizen.org/cgit/platform/upstream/toybox.git>tizen</a>
    981 and <a href=https://github.com/kraj/meta-musl/tree/master/recipes-core/toybox>openembedded</a>
    982 and <a href=https://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-apps/toybox>gentoo</a>
    983 and so on have all been using Georgi Chorbadzhiyski's git mirror rather
    984 than the mercurial repository, I bit the bullet and switched the project's repo
    985 <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox>to git</a>. Georgi's
    986 <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>mirror</a> is now pulling from that.</p>
    987 
    988 <a name="25-02-2015" /><a href="#25-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 25, 2015</b></h2></a>
    989 <blockquote><p>"A common mistake that people make when trying to design
    990 something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of
    991 complete fools."</p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
    992 
    993 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.5.2</a>
    994 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1702>commit 1702</a>) is out.</p>
    995 
    996 <p>New promoted commands: sed (finally fixed enough it builds Linux From
    997 Scratch), printf (cleaned up and promoted), shred and
    998 base64 (the Tizen guys wanted them), getenforce, setenforce, and chcon (android),
    999 mix (promoted with fixes from Isaac Dunham), nsenter (from
   1000 Andy Lutomirski, merged into unshare).</p>
   1001 
   1002 <p>Elliott Hughes submited a bunch of patches to support Android (to
   1003 both toybox and Bionic libc, which he maintains). On toybox's end this
   1004 involved a lot of fixups to portability.[ch] and fixes to over a dozen
   1005 commands, plus several new ones. Other portability fixes included working
   1006 with buildroot's uclibc fork and building for nommu targets.</p>
   1007 
   1008 <p>The new "make change" target builds each toybox command as a standalone
   1009 binary. Rather a lot of commands that didn't build by themselves (mv depending
   1010 on cp and so on) were hit with a large rock until they built standalone.
   1011 This involved rewriting bits of option parsing, more elaborate dependency
   1012 generation, making each command have its own config
   1013 symbol and main() function (even when it's just a wrapper calling another
   1014 command's main()), and so on. Also, some commands can't be built standalone
   1015 at a conceptual level: "help" describes other enabled commands and "sh"
   1016 has a number of bulitin commands (cd, exit, set) that require the
   1017 multiplexer infrastructure, so "make change" filters them out.</p>
   1018 
   1019 <p>The mailing list's web archive is still screwed up. Dreamhost has
   1020 been trying to fix it since approximately September. There are
   1021 <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>two</a>
   1022 <a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>other</a> less broken
   1023 archives, but neither has quite the same UI as mailman.</p>
   1024 
   1025 <h3>Bugfixes and tweaks</h3>
   1026 
   1027 <p>Cynt Rynt sent in tests for ifconfig,
   1028 Robert Thompson taught factor to accept whitespace separated arguments,
   1029 Hyejin Kim pointed out that some of mktemp's longopts were attached to
   1030 the wrong short options,
   1031 Luis Felipe Strano Moraes fixed a wrong free() call in bootchartd in pending.
   1032 Patches from Ashwini Sharma to make "df /dev/node" work, prevent du from
   1033 looping endlessly following symlinks, and to make expr.c
   1034 (in pending) understand == and regex matches. (Speaking of expr, it gets
   1035 priority groupings wrong but the bug was actually in the posix spec's
   1036 HTML conversion. They fixed the posix spec upstream for us. Still need
   1037 to fix the expr code, but it's in pending for a reason...)</p>
   1038 
   1039 <p>Some commands grew new option flags, such as cp --remove-destination
   1040 and touch -h.</p>
   1041 
   1042 <p>The parallel build has better error reporting now. When toybox needs to
   1043 re-exec itself to regain suid root permissions and hasn't got the suid bit,
   1044 it now gives the right error message ("not root" instead of "no such command").
   1045 
   1046 <p>Added a test to "mount" to not mount the same device/directory combination
   1047 over itself (the OS catches this for block devices, but not for tmpfs).
   1048 Make blkid distinguish ext3 from ext4. Added catv back into cat (because
   1049 the Android guys wanted it, and they have historical usage on their side,
   1050 so...). Handle nanoseconds in touch.</p>
   1051 
   1052 <p>Fixed a segfault when CP_MORE was disabled (the resulting option flag list
   1053 no longer defined -d but still had it in option groups at the end).
   1054 Workaround for glibc redefining dirname() and basename() to random non-posix
   1055 semantics because gnu. (They could have created dirname_r() but didn't want
   1056 to.)</p>
   1057 
   1058 <p>Fix an ifconfig test that was preventing assigning an ipv4 address to
   1059 interface aliases. Several cleanup passes on hwclock but not quite
   1060 promoted out of pending yet.<p>
   1061 
   1062 <p>Fixed a wrong error message in rm (if you had a chmod 000 directory and
   1063 did rm -r on it without -f, after the prompt it would complain it was a
   1064 directory, which was not the problem).</p>
   1065 
   1066 <p>The gzip compression code now does "store only" output to stdout, for
   1067 what that's worth.</p>
   1068 
   1069 <p>Cleanup mountpoint and expand, and remove them from toys/pending/README
   1070 (a list of commands that predate the toys/pending directory but needed
   1071 another pass).</p>
   1072 
   1073 <h3>Library and infrastructure:</h3>
   1074 
   1075 <p>Reworked the option parsing infrastructure so more commands build
   1076 standalone (via scripts/single.sh or "make change"). The option flag bit
   1077 values are no longer packed, it leaves spaces where currently disabled
   1078 flags go, and you can #define FORCE_FLAGS so disabled flags aren't zeroed.
   1079 This allows multiple commands to more easily share infrastructure, even if
   1080 your current flag context is for a disabled command (switched off in config),
   1081 you can force them to stay on and as long as the flags read the same right
   1082 to left they'll have the same values.</p>
   1083 
   1084 <p>We've started removing use of strncpy() because it's a hugely broken
   1085 standard C function: the length is the maximum length to _append_, not
   1086 the size of the destination buffer. It memsets the remaining space it didn't
   1087 copy ala "memset(dest+strlen(dest), 0, len);" so
   1088 if you think len is the size of dest you're guaranteed to stomp memory off the
   1089 end). And if it runs out of space it won't null terminate because reasons.
   1090 (Meanwhile sprintf("%*s", len, str) is counting wide characters in your current
   1091 locale, so if you set a locale other than "C" it will also go past your
   1092 allocated buffer size. Whoever is maintining the C library standards is really
   1093 bad at strings.)
   1094 Instead we have xstrncat() which will error_exit() if src+dest+1 doesn't
   1095 fit in the buffer. (Because randomly truncating input data isn't necessarily
   1096 an improvement.) And there's always xmprintf().</p>
   1097 
   1098 <p>Similarly, strtol() doesn't return an error indicator on overflow,
   1099 you have to clear and then check errno. So new xstrtol() that cares
   1100 about overflow.</p>
   1101 
   1102 <p>The bionic and musl guys agree faccessat(AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) is not
   1103 supported, so stop using it.</p>
   1104 
   1105 <p>Fixed toy_exec() to detect when argc is in optargs, so we don't
   1106 need a separate xexec_optargs().</p>
   1107 
   1108 <a name="18-02-2015" /><a href="#18-02-2015"><hr><h2><b>February 18, 2015</b></h2></a>
   1109 <p>Dreamhost continues to be unable to make mailing list archives work, so
   1110 here's <a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/toybox@lists.landley.net/>another
   1111 list archive</a> with a less awkward interface than gmane.</p>
   1112 
   1113 <p>(Neither gives you the convenient historical monthly views of mailman,
   1114 but I still have hopes dreamhost will someday figure out what they're doing
   1115 wrong. They've only been trying since October. Last month they did a
   1116 <a href=http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2015/01/14/discussion-list-hardware-maintenance/>hardware upgrade to fix a software problem</a>, and the stale
   1117 data loads much faster now, so that's something.)</p>
   1118 
   1119 <p>Update (Feb 19): the archive started updating again, by discarding
   1120 all the pending data. So there are now _two_ giant holes in Dreamhost's
   1121 web archive, from Dec 15-Jan 3, and then another hole from Jan 16-Feb 18.
   1122 The relevant messages are in both of the other archives. Here's hoping
   1123 the chronic archive constipation problem won't happen a sixth time.</p>
   1124 
   1125 <a name="30-12-2014" /><a href="#30-12-2014"><hr><h2><b>December 30, 2014</b></h2></a>
   1126 <p>Due to Dreamhost's <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost.txt>ongoing</a>
   1127 <a href=http://landley.net/dreamhost2.txt>inability</a> to make mailman
   1128 work reliably, I've added a link to a backup web archive at
   1129 <a href=http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox>gmane</a> to the nav bar
   1130 on the left.</p>
   1131 
   1132 <p>You still subscribe to the list through
   1133 <a href=http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net>the first link</a>.</p>
   1134 
   1135 <p>Update (January 27, 2015): they're <a href=https://twitter.com/landley/status/558428839462703104>still working on it</a>.</p>
   1136 
   1137 <a name="19-11-2014" /><a href="#19-11-2014"><hr><h2><b>November 19, 2014</b></h2></a>
   1138 
   1139 <blockquote><p>"This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1140 
   1141 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.1</a>
   1142 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1566>commit 1566</a>) is out.</p>
   1143 
   1144 <p>It's an interim release, mostly bugfixes. There are several new commands,
   1145 but they're all in pending.</p>
   1146 
   1147 <h3>Development</h3>
   1148 
   1149 <p>Finally implemented sed, which is still in pending because although
   1150 it's feature complete according to posix, and even passes the parts of
   1151 Busybox's sed test suite that aren't explicitly testing for gnu bugs we
   1152 don't want to copy, it's not yet good enough to build Linux From Scratch.
   1153 (The ./configure stages use very long sed scripts. 20 commits worth of
   1154 implementation and debugging, just under 1000 lines of code, and there's
   1155 still more to do. We're definitely up to some of the "fiddly" commands now.
   1156 Did you know "echo hello | sed p - -" segfaults gnu sed in Ubuntu 12.04?
   1157 Yeah...)</p>
   1158 
   1159 <p>Talked with the Tizen developers to follow up on their desire to
   1160 make toybox a part of the base Tizen system, and got a list of commands
   1161 to add to the roadmap. The tizen todo list is:</p>
   1162 
   1163 <blockquote><p>
   1164 wget, sha256*, gzip, gunzip, bunzip2, rsync, zdiff*,
   1165 less, ar, arch, base64, csplit, dir, fmt, join, 
   1166 nproc, shred, shuf, stdbuf, stty, test, tr, unexpand,
   1167 users, vdir, diff3, sdiff, dosfsck (fsck.vfat), awk, fdisk
   1168 </p></blockquote>
   1169 
   1170 <p>(Most of which was already on the todo list, but it helps prioritize.)</p>
   1171 
   1172 <p>Fixed md5sum and sha1sum on big endian systems (reported by James McMechan).
   1173 Andy Lutomirski fixed unshare's help text and option parsing,
   1174 and submitted nsenter (a tool to use setns(2)) to pending.
   1175 Isaac Dunham implemented acpi -ctV options, and spotted the bug that ls -d
   1176 was inappropraitely following command line symlinks without -H or -L (it
   1177 should act like ls -l does), and ls -F handles symlinks wrong too.
   1178 Lukasz Szpakowski sent in two bugfixes to tail.c. Cynt Rynt spotted an
   1179 unnecessary assignment in lib/password.c.</p>
   1180 
   1181 <p>Ashwini Sharma's team was as busy as usual, submitting tr, crontab, and
   1182 ipcrm, and hwclock to pending, more features to the pending ip.c, and a
   1183 pile of bugfixes (to chgrp, killall, ifconfig, insmod,
   1184 losetup, comm, cp, id, xwrap, netcat, modprobe, nohup...) mostly found by
   1185 static analysis. (These fixes are mostly to seldom-used codepaths like the
   1186 TOYBOX_FREE config option, but test coverage is always appreciated.) Ashwini
   1187 also suggested upgrading ln -f to leave the original target alone if link
   1188 creation fails, and reported that mv -f and -i weren't implemented (now fixed).</p>
   1189 
   1190 <p>New config option: TOYBOX_NORECURSE prevents xexec() from making internal
   1191 function calls (for nommu systems with a finite stack).</p>
   1192 
   1193 <p>The "toybox" multiplexer command no longer adds a trailing space to each
   1194 line of command names, so things like "./toybox | tr ' \n' '|'" to create
   1195 a grep pattern snippet are easier to do. (Why you'd want to is your business,
   1196 but the output is tidier now.)</p>
   1197 
   1198 <h3>Infrastructure</h3>
   1199 
   1200 <p>Isaac Dunham added Android support to portability.h, including compile
   1201 probes for functions missing from bionic-libc, and annotated the commands that
   1202 use those functions. We haven't really tested building against bionic,
   1203 but in theory it's possible now.</p>
   1204 
   1205 <p>Running the test suite now color codes the PASS/SKIP/FAIL notifications
   1206 if output is to a tty. (And in case you missed it last time, VERBOSE=fail
   1207 to stop at the first failure is really useful.)</p>
   1208 
   1209 <p>In loopfiles_rw() use O_CLOEXEC instead of O_RDONLY to request the loop
   1210 function close filehandles for us. (Otherwise the callback function must
   1211 close each supplied filehandle itself.)</p>
   1212 
   1213 <p>The printf-style escape parsing ("\n" and friends) got factored out into
   1214 a new unescape() function.</p>
   1215 
   1216 <a name="02-10-2014" /><a href="#02-10-2014"><hr><h2><b>October 2, 2014</b></h2></a>
   1217 <blockquote><p>"There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
   1218 The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss...
   1219 Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the
   1220 difficulties." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.<p></blockquote>
   1221 
   1222 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.5.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.5.0</a>
   1223 (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1512>commit 1512</a>) is out.</p>
   1224 
   1225 <h3>New commands</h3>
   1226 
   1227 <p>The new commands are find, install, factor, and mount. Promoted commands
   1228 (cleaned up and moved out of "pending") are lspci, inotifyd, and blockdev.</p>
   1229 
   1230 <p>cp now implements -HL and -F to force delete of pending files, cpio now
   1231 ignores -m and implements -p, ls -C now has utf8 support (using wcwidth
   1232 instead of strlen), and umount got a number of upgrades involving
   1233 looking things up in /proc/mounts. Other minor cleanups happend to
   1234 cut, touch, free, and id.</p>
   1235 
   1236 <p>In pending: Bradley Controy submitted mix (adjusts OSS sound volume). Ashwini
   1237 Sharma submitted diff, userdel, blockdev, ipcs, and crond, upgraded
   1238 fdisk, fsck, and ftpget, and ran a static analyzer on a lot of other code.
   1239 Partial cleanup was done to useradd, userdel, groupadd, and groupdel.</p>
   1240 
   1241 <h3>Build infrastructure</h3>
   1242 
   1243 <p><b>Parallel builds</b></p>
   1244 
   1245 <p>The build now takes advantage of SMP, autodetecting the number of
   1246 processors. (Export the environment variable CPUS to pick a specific number.)
   1247 Other build changes: split out $LDOPTIMIZE because old compilers complain
   1248 about linker options passed with -c, and the entire "generated" directory now
   1249 gets deleted by clean (the README that was in there got merged into code.html).</p>
   1250 
   1251 <p><b>Standalone builds</b></p>
   1252 
   1253 <p>The standalone build infrastructure (scripts/single.sh) got upgraded to
   1254 build more commands as standalone executables. In make.sh the source file
   1255 selection uses a regex to find the source files with the NEWTOY/OLDTOY macro
   1256 for the command. It enables each command's
   1257 sub-options (so CP has CP_MORE), enables I18N and FLOAT support to build
   1258 full-featured commands, and includes --help text (at least when
   1259 the command doesn't use another command's help). The OLDTOY() macro
   1260 now produces (redundant) function prototypes so you can build an OLDTOY
   1261 without the NEWTOY</p>
   1262 
   1263 <p>It doesn't quite have complete coverage yet, the defconfig entries that
   1264 aren't building standalone yet are:</p>
   1265 
   1266 <blockquote><p>chown, egrep, fgrep, fstype, halt, mv, nc, poweroff, unix2dos,
   1267 whoami</p></blockquote>
   1268 
   1269 <p>The main reason for standalone build failures is NEWTOY() or OLDTOY()
   1270 entries that don't have their own config symbol. Another problem is entries
   1271 that depend on another entry in kconfig, usually because common infrastructure
   1272 is using one command's flags (which the other commands copy): if that command
   1273 is disabled, the FLAG macros become 0 so dead code elimination can remove the
   1274 code. It's <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/1503>possible
   1275 to untangle</a> this, but a bit awkward. (It boils down to conflicting
   1276 design goals in the two contexts.)</p>
   1277 
   1278 <p>Standalone builds are used by the test suite when testing individual
   1279 commands.
   1280 
   1281 <p><b>Snapshot builds</b></p>
   1282 
   1283 <p>A new addition to the "generated" directory is generated/build.sh
   1284 containing a single compiler command line to build toybox in its current
   1285 configuration. Combined with the generated/*.{h,sh} files from an
   1286 exisiting build, this may let you build on a new system that hasn't quite
   1287 got enough OS bits working to run a full configureand make.</p>
   1288 
   1289 <h3>Internals</h3>
   1290 
   1291 <p>Library code: xcreate/xopen now O_CLOEXEC by default to avoid leaking
   1292 filehandles to child processes. DIRTREE_COMEAGAIN's second callback is now
   1293 done with the directory filehandle still open (new dir->again variable added
   1294 to distinguish first from second callback, and requesting DIRTREE_RECURSE now
   1295 requires passing in the specific macro value, not just a true/false).
   1296 Use daemon() out of libc instead of hand-rolled daemonize() in various
   1297 pending commands. string_to_mode() now passes through type bits so you can
   1298 use it to more easily modify a file's existing mode.
   1299 Split xpopen() into xpopen_both(), xopen(), and xrun() depending on whether
   1300 we want to redirect both, one, or neither of stdin/stdout.</p>
   1301 
   1302 <p>Bugfixes: Better error message when TOYBOX_SUID option can't drop priviliges
   1303 (which happens when you suid something _other_ than root).
   1304 The old pending version of nbd_client.c wasn't deleted when the
   1305 command was promoted (and the build would break if both were enabled),
   1306 toy_exec() sometimes needs to re-exec from $PATH rather than recurse
   1307 internally (to gain dropped root permissions or limit stack depth),
   1308 always call setlocale() when I18N is enabled to switch it back _off_ when
   1309 we run commands that expect sscanf("%n") to return bytes,
   1310 dirtree() had a memory leak in an error path, patch.c had some bugs in
   1311 error paths (didn't report problem clearly). Ashwini Sharma spotted an
   1312 option parsing bug where [-abc] would forget _all_ command line arguments
   1313 saved in the GLOBALS() block (not just the ones for options being switched
   1314 off), plus various minor fixes to nbd_client and cpio.
   1315 Lukasz Szpakowski fixed rm -f on a broken symlink (failed), and killall
   1316 with no arguments (segfaulted).</p>
   1317 
   1318 <p><b>Portability</b></p>
   1319 
   1320 <p>A somewhat fiddly fix to rm -rf (which needs to chmod directories to u+rwx
   1321 to descend into them) which hit a musl bug in faccessat() which the musl
   1322 maintainer refuses to fix. (He literally wants the man page changed
   1323 instead, despite other libcs working.) Added an #ifdef __MUSL__ section
   1324 to portability.h with a workaround, you may need CFLAGS=-D__MUSL__ in your
   1325 build if your musl build's features.h doesn't #define that. (I may do
   1326 a different workaround in future, but sometimes you've just got to make
   1327 it work so you can ship. Also, toybox grep with multiple patterns
   1328 requires <a href=http://landley.net/hg/aboriginal/rev/1692>a patch
   1329 to musl's regex engine</a>, which applies to 1.1.4 but not to the current
   1330 musl source control.)</p>
   1331 
   1332 <p>More portability.h fixes for uClibc too. (I don't expect that to ever have
   1333 another release, so locally patching around posix-2008 violations is silly).</p>
   1334 
   1335 <p><b>Change to username filtering</b></p>
   1336 
   1337 <p>Posix recommends the username creation logic filter usernames to a small
   1338 allowed set of characters (which even Red Hat breaks by explicitly allowing
   1339 "$" at the end), but this prevents UTF-8 usernames. Posix' stated logic
   1340 is to allow filesystems to create the user's home directory, but Linux
   1341 filesystems can accept any character but NUL and "/". The only characters
   1342 we actually _need_ to filter out are ":" (field separator in passwd),
   1343 newline (line separator in passwd), and "/" (directory separator in
   1344 filesystem).</p>
   1345 
   1346 <h3>Documentation</h3>
   1347 
   1348 <p>Web pages updated: cleanup.html documents more cleanup, code.html
   1349 documents more code, and about.html now capitalizes "toybox" consistently
   1350 (it's just a word, capitalize at start of sentence).</p>
   1351 
   1352 <p>The pending/README file now lists commands that needed review/cleanup
   1353 before the pending directory was added.</p>
   1354 
   1355 <h3>Test Suite</h3>
   1356 
   1357 <p>Moved out of scripts/test into top level "tests" directory, and the
   1358 testing.sh script is now in scripts rather than mixed into the *.test files.</p>
   1359 
   1360 <p>Johan Bergstrm requested VERBOSE=fail to make tests (telling it to
   1361 stop at the first failure), and spotted a build bug where using gnu
   1362 sort on the host broke in non-C locales.</p>
   1363 
   1364 <p>Divya Kothari submitted tests for chmod, link, tar, bzcat, xzcat, zcat,
   1365 and hostname. (And more, but that's all that's merged so far.)</p>
   1366 
   1367 <a name="07-07-2014" /><a href="#07-07-2014"><hr><h2><b>July 7, 2014</b></h2></a>
   1368 <blockquote><p>"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this:
   1369 most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many
   1370 solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely
   1371 concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd
   1372 because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were
   1373 unhappy." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1374 
   1375 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.9.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.9</a> (<a href=/hg/toybox/shortlog/1385>commit 1385</a>) is out.</p>
   1376 
   1377 <p><b>New commands</b> added to pending include:
   1378 lsattr, chattr, inotifyd, rfkill, sulogin, strings, makedevs,
   1379 killall5, and tar from Ashwini Sharma, arp from Kyungwan Han,
   1380 sysctl by Bilal Qureshi, partprobe from Bertold Van den Bergh,
   1381 host from Rich felker, and I did nbd-client and the first 2/3 of mount.</p>
   1382 
   1383 <p>Finished cleanups (commands promoted out of pending):
   1384 sysctl, rfkill, strings, mkpasswd, makedevs, partprobe, killall5,
   1385 fallocate, and nbd-client.</p>
   1386 
   1387 <p>(Along the way partial cleanups got made to: last, fold, lspci, ps,
   1388 bootchartd, init, fsck, telnetd, telnet, vconfig, toysh, iconv, useradd,
   1389 login, host, openvt, deallocvt, getty, tftpd, and modprobe. But there's
   1390 still more to do on all of those.)</p>
   1391 
   1392 <p>This time around the <a href=bin>static binaries</a> are linked against
   1393 musl instead of uClibc. (That's why there's no sparc version, musl doesn't
   1394 support that target yet.)</p>
   1395 
   1396 <p><b>Documentation:</b></p>
   1397 
   1398 <p>The help text parser expects lower case "usage:" lines with
   1399 a blank line after them, so go through and regularize those. Expand the
   1400 "coding style" section in the docs and move it to design.html. (Not a show
   1401 stopper for incoming
   1402 contributions, just an explanation of some of the things I'll do to them
   1403 during cleanup.) The help text for the "toybox" command now includes
   1404 the shell script snippet to install symlinks to the toybox binary.</p>
   1405 
   1406 <p>The <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a> now has descriptions for the
   1407 full ifconfig cleanup series, among others.</p>
   1408 
   1409 <p>The new toys/examples directory contains hello.c and skeleton.c. The first is
   1410 a simple hello world program in toybox style, the second is a much more
   1411 elaborate example program using showing how to use the command line option
   1412 parsing and how to provide multiple commands in the same C file.</p>
   1413 
   1414 <p><b>Fixes</b>:</p>
   1415 
   1416 <p>Fix od bug reported by Samuel Holland ("od -v -b" was appending the default
   1417 output type even though an output type was specified). Ashwini Sharma reported
   1418 bugs where readfile() was incorrectly freeing its buffer, and where toy_init()
   1419 was zeroing the wrong data because the field it was using to measure (rebound)
   1420 had moved (when I moved it back I added a comment why the field needs to be
   1421 there), fixed a segfault in the dhcp client, and made a 0 length read at
   1422 the start of password entry count as EOF. Make the "we are not root" test
   1423 in the init code show the help text. Posix implies that fflush() can return
   1424 success even when the stream's error bit is set, so call both fflush() and
   1425 ferror() from xprintf().</p>
   1426 
   1427 <p>Isaac Dunham pointed out that bloatcheck couldn't deal with diff
   1428 implementations that only implement "unified diff" format, and that some
   1429 diff implementations can't handle nonseekable input (I.E. reading from
   1430 a pipe). Bugfix so "help -a" works again. Option parsing on nohup now stops
   1431 at first nonoption argument. Fix segfault in "which" if PATH wasn't set,
   1432 which was actually a bug in lib function find_in_path(). Made rm -rf of
   1433 chmod 000 directories actually remove them.</p>
   1434 
   1435 <p>The build now passes the same $CFLAGS to the library probe as the final
   1436 build, because arch linux is so broken it provides different sets of
   1437 libraries for static and dynamic linking.</p>
   1438 
   1439 <p>It turns out sprintf("%.123s", str) is counting characters, not bytes,
   1440 so globally enabling locale support opens stack smashing vulnerabilities.
   1441 So there's a new TOYFLAGS_LOCALE you set in toyflags when you want the
   1442 setup code to setlocale().</p>
   1443 
   1444 <p><b>Upgrades:</b></p>
   1445 
   1446 <p>Isaac Dunham extended cpio to archive unreadable empty files, and I taught it
   1447 to set uid/gid and timestamp when extracting archives. Isaac also
   1448 added tests for cpio, link, and du, added lspci -i, made the pci database
   1449 parsing skip # comment lines, merged logname and whoami into id.</p>
   1450 
   1451 <p>Daniel Verkamp sped up md5sum about 30% with some loop unrolling, making
   1452 it actually smaller in the process. I added -b flags to md5sum and sha1sum
   1453 for "brief" output that's just the hash with no filename. (I'm aware other
   1454 implementations use that for MSDOS "binary" mode, and don't care.)</p>
   1455 
   1456 <p>When building standalone commands (scripts/singleconfig.sh commandname),
   1457 the build now switches on all the sub-options of the command so we get
   1458 a standalone version with all the bells and whistles enabled.</p>
   1459 
   1460 <p>Add -ds flags to date and document +FORMAT escapes. Add the shell NOP
   1461 command ":" as an alias for true (for toysh).</p>
   1462 
   1463 <p>Add uClibc probe for iconv() and fallocate. (The fact it didn't always
   1464 build against uClibc is why fallocate wasn't enabled in defconfig before.)</p>
   1465 
   1466 <p>The umount command now does an losetup -d on the device by default, so
   1467 we don't leak loopback devices. Bugfix to losetup so "losetup /dev/loop0
   1468 filename" actually works again.</p>
   1469 
   1470 <p>Divya Kothari sent in test suite entries for ls, ln, rm, mv, printf, dd,
   1471 and renice. Then a second round for lsattr/chattr, mount, chmod, pgrep/pkill,
   1472 groupadd, groupdel, and useradd. Several of these uncovered bugs, still
   1473 working to fix them.</p>
   1474 
   1475 <p>There are now free() functions for the predefined llist types and a
   1476 dlist_terminate() function to break doubly linked lists. The new
   1477 generic_signal() handler either sets "toys.signal" or writes a byte
   1478 to toys.signalfd with the signal number if signalfd isn't -1 (which it's
   1479 initialized to in toy_init).</p>
   1480 
   1481 <p>The option parsing logic can now detect when a double fits in a long and
   1482 use the more precise type for floating point arguments (the FLOAT macro
   1483 contains the type used). The human_readable() function now just outputs
   1484 decimal kilo/mega/gigabytes (so when du -u says 5.0G it means 5.0 billion
   1485 bytes). The build infrastructure now notices duplicate commands (so if you
   1486 cp toys/pending/command.c toys/other/command.c and forget to delete the
   1487 first one, the build break is now more informative).</p>
   1488 
   1489 <a name="20-04-2014" /><a href="#20-04-2014"><hr><h2><b>April 20, 2014</b></h2></a>
   1490 <blockquote><p>And to this end they built themselves a stupendous supercomputer
   1491 which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks
   1492 had been connected up it had started from "I think therefore I am" and got as
   1493 far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to
   1494 turn it off. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1495 
   1496 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.8.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.8</a> is based on
   1497 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1262>commit 1262</a>. And
   1498 about time too.</p>
   1499 
   1500 <p>The big news is that the build no longer needs python to generate help.h,
   1501 that's now done in C. The help text generation is also collating help text
   1502 from multiple options, merging command line option blocks and usage: lines.
   1503 There's even a new <a href=help.html>help web page</a>.</p>
   1504 
   1505 <p><b>New commands:</b> Ifconfig, cpio, and su were cleaned up the rest of the
   1506 way and promoted out of pending. That saga is mostly explained on the
   1507 <a href=cleanup.html>cleanup page</a>. Vivek Bhagat's freeramdisk,
   1508 Isaac Dunham's fsfreeze, and Felix Janda's iconv are also new.</p>
   1509 
   1510 <p><b>In pending:</b>
   1511 Ashwini Sharma's team submitted tcpsvd, udpsvd, telnet, telnetd, last, more,
   1512 groupdel/delgroup, arping, brctl, ftpget, ftpput, printf, reset, and added
   1513 ipv6 support to traceroute. Kyungwan Han's team submitted modprobe and getty.
   1514 Vivek Bhagat submitted openvt and deacllocvt. Samuel Holland submitted fold.
   1515 I wrote a new inflate (zip/zlib/gzip decompression) implementation in
   1516 compress.c, and still  need to do a corresponding deflate (compression-side)
   1517 and plug them into gzip and zip and so on. (Right now it does zcat.)</p>
   1518 
   1519 <p>Several commands (vmstat, login, du, vconfig, mountpoint, free, chroot,
   1520 cut, touch, modinfo, expand) predate the "pending" directory, and are thus
   1521 in other directories but still need cleanup. Of these, vmstat got some
   1522 work this time (which would be much easier other vmstat implementations
   1523 documented what their output actually meant).</p>
   1524 
   1525 <p><b>Upgrades:</b> Ifconfig grew /prefix netmask support (ala 1.2.3.4/24). Grep now has -zZ to
   1526 handle null terminated data, cksum grew -H for hex output. Upgraded od so the
   1527 fields align better when producing multiple output types. Help has -a and -h
   1528 options (all commands, html output).
   1529 Bugfix to blkid building for a 32 bit target. The date command can actually
   1530 set dates now. The O_NOFOLLOW compile time probe didn't work with cross
   1531 compiling, so it's back to an #ifdef test in portability.h. Nathan McSween
   1532 sent in a bugfix to od and a portability fix in the common library code.
   1533 Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in pidof -o, and added verbose (-v) options
   1534 to mkdir and ln, and suggested killall should have an -s option and
   1535 allow -l to take zero arguments. Ashwini Sharma and Felix Janda upgraded
   1536 tftpd.  Fixed dumpleases still using toynet.h after
   1537 that was removed. Corrected killall return code and error reporting.
   1538 Isacc Dunham fixed bugs all over the tree, did cleanup on a bunch of
   1539 pending commands (getty, ftpget, init, openvt, modprobe...), and clarified
   1540 find's help text. Tom Sparrow ran three different static analyzers on
   1541 the code, which resulted in a few cleanups. The peek()/poke() functions
   1542 now use "volatile" to prevent broken compiler "optimizations" to do with
   1543 aliasing.</p>
   1544 
   1545 <p><b>Build stuff:</b> Each FOR_xxxx macro now has a complementary CLEANUP_xxxx macro, so you
   1546 can put multiple commands with different command line options in the same
   1547 .c file, so they can share infrastructure outside of lib. (This let the
   1548 bunzip logic move out of lib into bzcat.c.) See XXX for example.
   1549 i
   1550 <p>The headers #included in toys.h are now grouped by standard, and headers
   1551 not listed in Posix or LSB were moved to portability.h. The old xregcomp.h
   1552 was folded into lib.h because it's posix (and supporting oddball uClibc
   1553 configurations isn't as important as it once was).</p>
   1554 
   1555 <p>Regression tested against Ubuntu 8.04 to fix up bit-rot in defconfig
   1556 build on older systems. (We depend on Posix-2008, but not necessarily
   1557 the absolute latest build environment.)</p>
   1558 
   1559 <p><b>In lib</b>: lib/xwrap.c added xgetpwnam(), xchroot(), and lib/lib.c now has names_to_pid().
   1560 xsetuid() was replaced with xsetuser() which takes a struct passwd
   1561 and sets both gid and uid, mkpathat() got factored out into a library command,
   1562 get_int_value() became atolx_range(), and
   1563 xmsprintf() is now just xmprintf(). The bunzip2 logic moved from lib into
   1564 bzcat.c.</p>
   1565 
   1566 <p><b>Documentation</b>: new <a href=help.html>help page</a> with the
   1567 help text for all the defconfig commands, using the new help -ah output.
   1568 The <a href=code.html>source code walkthrough</a> now says more about
   1569 #including header files, and how the generated/* directory works. The
   1570 <a href=design.html>design page</a> has some new paragraphs about trading
   1571 of different kinds of simplicity, and why comments aren't a substitute for
   1572 good code. The README no longer trails off into obvious unfinished confusion
   1573 at the end. Each page on the website should now have its own title.</p>
   1574 
   1575 <a name="18-11-2013" /><a href="#18-11-2013"><hr><h2><b>November 18, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1576 <blockquote><p>"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -
   1577 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1578 
   1579 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.7.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.7</a> is based on
   1580 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1122>commit 1122</a>.</p>
   1581 
   1582 <p>New commands: Brad Conroy submitted blkid. Elie De Brauwer submitted
   1583 reboot, halt, and poweroff. Strake's nl got cleaned up and promoted from
   1584 pending to posix. In addition, the existing chvt and vconfig got some
   1585 cleanup.</p>
   1586 
   1587 <p>That said, I haven't nearly kept up with the flood of new commands going
   1588 into pending: Ashwini Sharma's team submitted
   1589 dd, dumpleases, traceroute, top, useradd, groupadd, mkpasswd, tftpd, and
   1590 an fsck wrapper (with no filesystem drivers yet). Isaac Dunham sent in cpio.</p>
   1591 
   1592 <p>Bugfixes: Jeroen van Rijn added a user count to uptime. Elie De Brauwer
   1593 added -e to watch, removed a memory leak, and fixed a terminal size problem.
   1594 William Haddon made xargs call its command line once even with blank input
   1595 (the standard is vague, but builds expect it), and fixed an off by one bug
   1596 where grep didn't malloc enough space with -E (leading to a segfault).
   1597 I fixed a glitch in bunzip2 (same one as went into busybox since they're using
   1598 the code I wrote), in od to fix -t co, -J, and -c options. Add uname -o as a
   1599 synonym for -s. Build fix to never use $CC without prefixing it with
   1600 $CROSS_COMPILE (since $HOSTCC could be different). Anca Emanuel spotted
   1601 a typo in the web page.</p>
   1602 
   1603 <p>The compile-time command line option parsing got rewritten (ported from
   1604 bash to C), which should speed up builds a bit and allow code controlled by
   1605 --longopts to drop out properly when disabled in the configuration. Terminal
   1606 querying got refactored. Patch's -x option is now more informative (a
   1607 debug thing if you're trying to figure out why a patch didn't apply).
   1608 The "toynet.h" file got folded into toys.h since musl supports it and
   1609 micromanging uClibc options isn't very interesting anymore. The test suite
   1610 now uses scripts/single.sh when testing a single command.</p>
   1611 
   1612 <a name="17-09-2013" /><a href="#17-09-2013"><hr><h2><b>September 17, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1613 <blockquote><p>"Think of a number," said the computer, "any number."
   1614 Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King's Cross railway
   1615 station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function,
   1616 and this might turn out to be it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p>
   1617 </blockquote>
   1618 
   1619 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.6.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.6</a> is based on
   1620 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/1068>commit 1068</a>.</p>
   1621 
   1622 <p>This release adds
   1623 several new commands: Felix Janda wrote paste and fallocate, Kyungwan Han
   1624 submitted eject, Strake contributed grep, Ashwini Sharma added pmap (and
   1625 a testsuite entry for grep), Lukasz Skalski sent pwdx, Isaac Dunham posted
   1626 acpi, and I did timeout and umount.</p>
   1627 
   1628 <p>The ls command now has a --color=auto option (suggested by Rich Felker).
   1629 The multiplexer now has a --help option so you can say "./toybox --help blah"
   1630 instead of using the built-in "help" command. (Which is a shell built-in.
   1631 Try it on your command line, it's like man for shell builtins. But a certain
   1632 other project has conditioned people to expect --help, so...) I forget who
   1633 heehooman at gmail is but they pointed out unshare needed PID and UID
   1634 namespace support.</p>
   1635 
   1636 <h3>Pending</h3>
   1637 
   1638 <p>A lot of new commands in toys/pending, to the point the next release should
   1639 probably just focus on cleanup and review of this backlog. We've got klogd,
   1640 dhcp, dhcpd, watch, route, and ps from
   1641 Ashwini Sharma (and an fsck wrapper but no fsck.fstype engines yet),
   1642 syslogd, pgrep, and pkill from Madhur Verma, netstat by Ranjan Kumar,
   1643 test by Felix Janda, lspci by Isaac Dunham, nl, su, and renice by strake (I.E.
   1644 M. Farkas-Dyck), and sysvinit by Kyungwan Han.</p>
   1645 
   1646 <p>Some cleanup work on existing pending commands that aren't
   1647 ready to promote yet: I did a few more rounds on ifconfig
   1648 and Isaac Dunham's did several cleanups to xzcat, Felix Janda cleaned up
   1649 logger and syslogd...</p>
   1650 
   1651 <p>Also some cleanup work on commands that predate the pending directory,
   1652 but weren't quite polished when they went in, most prominently du,
   1653 expand, and touch.</p> 
   1654 
   1655 <h3>Infrastructure</h3>
   1656 
   1657 <p>The new scripts/single.sh builds a standalone command without the
   1658 multiplexer, although not all commands can be built that way yet (NEWTOY yes,
   1659 OLDTOY no) and the space savings aren't anything to write home about. (If a
   1660 command needs the option parsing logic at all, it needs all of it.) If
   1661 you're curious, you can do:</p>
   1662 
   1663 <blockquote><pre>
   1664 make defconfig
   1665 make
   1666 mkdir singles
   1667 for i in $(./toybox)
   1668 do
   1669   echo $i
   1670   PREFIX=singles/ scripts/single.sh $i || break
   1671 done
   1672 </pre>
   1673 <p>(And then wait a long time and watch almost half the builds fail.)</p>
   1674 </blockquote>
   1675 
   1676 <p>There is now libbuf analogous to toybuf, another global 4k buffer this
   1677 time for use by lib/ code instead of command code.</p>
   1678 
   1679 <p>The lib directory got split up a bit, lib/pending.c contains functions
   1680 not yet used by anything outside of toys/pending/*, and lib/xwrap.c contains
   1681 functions that wrap other functions and handle failures (via error_exit).
   1682 This leaves lib/lib.c containing actual new functions.</p>
   1683 
   1684 <p>General improvements and bug fixes to argument parsing. The [-abc] exclude
   1685 logic should now clear arguments slots when disabling options. Bare --longopts
   1686 should work now and be able to report errors using their name, the new ;
   1687 option allows optional arguments to longopts only suppliable with = (I.E.
   1688 --color and --color=auto but not --color auto).</p>
   1689 
   1690 <p>I'm gradually weaning the code off of itoa()/utoa() because sprintf
   1691 does this already. In this case "simple" probably means "let libc do it
   1692 for us".</p>
   1693 
   1694 <p>Rewrote for_each_pid_with_name_in() and renamed it to just names_to_pid().
   1695 It shouldn't get confused trying to compare absolute and relative paths quite
   1696 so much anymore.</p>
   1697 
   1698 <p>lib/llist.c grew a new dlist_pop() function for removing a doubly
   1699 linked list entry while maintaining a circular list; tail and patch are
   1700 using it now.</p>
   1701 
   1702 <p>The musl guys suggested a new optimization flag
   1703 (-fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables)
   1704 that shaves about 10% off the binary size by removing a C++ism that crept
   1705 into gcc's idea of C. While I don't normally try to micromanage the compiler,
   1706 "-fstop-being-stupid" is a thing you have to hit gcc with from time to time.</p>
   1707 
   1708 <h3>Bugfixes</h3>
   1709 
   1710 <p>Felix Janda and I did a largeish rewrite of tail to
   1711 finally make it work right (we think). Still need to implement tail -f
   1712 someday (the tricky bit is making -f follow multiple files at once).
   1713 Felix also reported a bug in xpidfile.</p>
   1714 
   1715 <p>Juhani Haverinen pointed out that
   1716 python 3 doesn't work with config2help.py, so the detection logic looks
   1717 for python2 (until I get around to rewriting that in C). Elie De Brauwer
   1718 then fixed our first attempt at this, and also fixed uname's help string.</p>
   1719 
   1720 <p>Ashwini Sharma
   1721 pointed out the build was making a FLAG_ macro for " " which broke some
   1722 configurations. (That's a control character, not a command line option.)</p>
   1723 
   1724 <p>Jacek Bukarewicz pointed out a bug in chdir permission handling, and
   1725 a way to make env segfault. Both should be fixed now.</p> 
   1726 
   1727 <p>The new function xexec_optargs()
   1728 replaces calls to xexec(toys.optargs) to avoid freeing and reusing optargs
   1729 during option parsing screwing stuff up (such as netcat's exec mode).</p>
   1730 
   1731 <p>The stat command's %a output was padded with leading zeroes, which
   1732 didn't match anybody else's behavior and thus made the test suite hiccup
   1733 between TEST_HOST and testing toybox. (If you go "TEST_HOST=1 scripts/test.sh
   1734 command" it sanity checks the tests against the host implementation.)</p>
   1735 
   1736 <p>Last release, "mkdir sub/sub && chmod 007 sub/sub && rm -rf sub" didn't
   1737 delete sub and didn't exit with an error either. Neither was correct, rm
   1738 should now be fixed.</p>
   1739 
   1740 <p>
   1741 <a name="26-07-2013" /><a href="#26-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 26, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1742 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski maintains a <a href=https://github.com/gfto/toybox>git
   1743 mirror</a> of the repository on github, automatically updated from the
   1744 mercurial every 6 hours. The mirror is read only, but you can generate patches
   1745 against it and post them to the list.</p>
   1746 
   1747 <a name="02-07-2013" /><a href="#02-07-2013"><hr><h2><b>July 2, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1748 <blockquote><p>"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "Very deep. You
   1749 should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people
   1750 like you." -
   1751 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1752 
   1753 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.5.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.5</a> is based on
   1754 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/941>commit 941</a>. It adds
   1755 uuencode and uudecode from Erich Plondke, and enables Luis Morales' "who" by
   1756 default. Felix Janda and I cleaned up last year's "stat" submission and
   1757 enabled it. Ivo van Poorten added "groups".
   1758 Andre Renaud added "lsusb". I implemented "split", "pivot_root", and "mv".
   1759 </p>
   1760 
   1761 <p>The "help" command is implemented differently now (lib/help.c) and
   1762 each command can now understand --help (including both "toybox --help"
   1763 and "toybox --help command" in the multiplexer).</p>
   1764 
   1765 <p>The "pending" directory has several commands (find, xzcat, nbd-client,
   1766 logger, expr) which work but are not enabled by default pending further cleanup.
   1767 Ifconfig is enabled, but still in pending because it's only 2/3 cleaned up.
   1768 (It's an awkward halfway state but I'm not holding up the release for it.)</p>
   1769 
   1770 <p>I'm <a href=cleanup.html>documenting the cleanups</a> to teach
   1771 more people to do it, but the writeups aren't caught up yet. The
   1772 <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> also got updated a bit with further analysis
   1773 of other projects, and the README and about pages got updated.</p>
   1774 
   1775 <p>Fixed _another_ "ls -C" segfault when terminal size can't be detected,
   1776 condensed the ls help text to fit on one page, implented --color, and taught
   1777 -l to print the major, minor numbers when showing block/char devices.
   1778 Argument parsing now handles "--" properly (to end option checking),
   1779 and the infrastructure can now handle bare --longopts that have no
   1780 corresponding short option (both were implemented before but didn't work).
   1781 Fixed an old bug in "patch", chmod grew -f, who grew -a. Isaac Dunham
   1782 fixed "-" vs "_" handling in modinfo, added a "firmware" output
   1783 field, added -b and -k support, and taught it that the ".ko" extension means
   1784 to look for the file at the specified path instead of under /lib. Felix Janda
   1785 moved file permission display code to lib so ls and
   1786 stat could share it. Ashwini Sharma spotted a bug in xabspath when the
   1787 last path component exists but we haven't got permissions to open it
   1788 (ala readlink -f /dev/sda as a normal user).
   1789 </p>
   1790 
   1791 <p>In the build infrastructure, scripts/findglobals.sh finds leaked global
   1792 variables. (Leaked means they aren't part of the global union: Other than glibc
   1793 debris, toybox should define "this", "toy_list", "toybuf", and "toys", and
   1794 that's it; the rest add memory footprint to every command for the benefit of
   1795 just one command; use GLOBALS() to stick 'em in the union.) Static linking
   1796 against libraries other than the host's libc now applies to feature probes
   1797 for unshare and such. Neuter stupid internationalization support that makes
   1798 various host "sort" commands put things in an order other than alphabetical
   1799 (breaking the multiplexer's binary search on command names).
   1800 
   1801 <p>You should now be able to build from a source control snapshot on a build
   1802 system that hasn't got python: if you disable CONFIG_TOYBOX_HELP. (The
   1803 release tarballs ship generated/help.h, but it's not in source control.
   1804 Eventually I should rewrite that python script in C.)</p>
   1805 </p>
   1806 
   1807 <p><b>LICENSE TWEAK</b>: After <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-March/000794.html>discussion</a> on the mailing list the "2 clause
   1808 BSD" <a href=license.html>license</a> got slightly simplified so the first
   1809 paragraph now says:</p>
   1810 
   1811 <blockquote><p>Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this
   1812 software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.</p></blockquote>
   1813 
   1814 <p>It used to continue "provided that the above copyright notice and this
   1815 permission notice appear in all copies", but A) what's the point? B) does "all
   1816 copies" mean binaries, or just source code, or what? C) lots of projects
   1817 that consider BSD and GPL compatible have <a href=https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/crypto/aes_generic.c>files with
   1818 both license notices</a> on them (sometimes at <a href=http://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/shell/ash.c>opposite ends of the file</a> to make the conflict
   1819 less obvious) because "all copies must include this function" would violate
   1820 the GPL but "all copies must include this magic text blob" somehow don't?</p>
   1821 
   1822 <p>I don't want to have to care about this anymore. The tweaked version is more
   1823 or less public domain with a liability disclaimer, but we're still calling it
   1824 BSD (sometimes "0 clause BSD") to avoid explaining.</p>
   1825 
   1826 <a name="21-03-2013" /><a href="#21-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 21, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1827 <p>Video of my ELC talk
   1828 "<a href=http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0>Why is Toybox?</a>"
   1829 is up on youtube. Related materials include the
   1830 <a href=http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt>talk outline</a> and an
   1831 <a href=/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost>android self-hosting writeup</a>.</p>
   1832 
   1833 <p>[Updated June 4] The following links jump to specific topics in the video. (Sorry about
   1834 the ads, it's The Linux Foundation.)</p>
   1835 
   1836 <ul>
   1837 <li>0m29s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=0m29s>The smartphone is replacing the PC</a></li>
   1838   <ul>
   1839   <li>4m22s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=4m22s>Software needed to become self-hosting</a></li>
   1840   <li>6m20s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=6m20s>Do we care if android or iphone wins?</a></li>
   1841   </ul>
   1842 <li>9m45s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=9m45s>Android not vanilla: oppose or accept?</a></li>
   1843   <ul>
   1844   <li>11m30s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s>Open source can't do User Interfaces</a></li>
   1845   </ul>
   1846 <li>15m09s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=15m09s>Android is not copyleft: oppose or accept?</a></li>
   1847 <li>18m23s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=18m23s>Security issues</a></li>
   1848 <li>21m15s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=21m15s>Solutions to the software problems</a></li>
   1849   <ul>
   1850   <li>22m55s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=22m55s>What toybox needs to be/do</a></li>
   1851   <li>28m17s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m17s>What is toybox?</a></li>
   1852     <ul>
   1853     <li>28m58s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=28m58s>Why toybox started...</a></li>
   1854     <li>37m50s <a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=37m50s>What does toybox actually implement?</a></li>
   1855     </ul>
   1856   </ul>
   1857 </ul>
   1858 </span>
   1859 
   1860 
   1861 <a name="14-03-2013" /><a href="#14-03-2013"><hr><h2><b>March 14, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1862 <blockquote><p>"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." -
   1863 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1864 
   1865 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.4.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.4</a> is based on
   1866 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/813>commit 813</a>, adding
   1867 the "time" and "readahead" commands, plus some bugfixes.</p>
   1868 
   1869 <p>The "cp" command now implements the -s symlink option, plus bugfixes
   1870 getting various corner cases right as used in actual package builds.
   1871 "id -Gn root" should now print root's groups
   1872 instead of the current user's. Several build fixes so toybox builds under
   1873 Ubuntu 8.04 again (which is about as old a build environment as you
   1874 can expect to find posix-2008 features in).</p>
   1875 
   1876 <p>Unfinished commands have generally been moved to "toys/pending".
   1877 Everything else should "default y" to participate in make defconfig.
   1878 Several of those pending commands got some basic cleanup so allyesconfig
   1879 should at least compile (although defconfig is still what's useful).</p>
   1880 
   1881 <p>Significant roadmap updates, checking several other multicall binaries
   1882 (klibc, sash, sbase, s6...) to see what commands they include.</p>
   1883 
   1884 <a name="18-01-2013" /><a href="#18-01-2013"><hr><h2><b>January 18, 2013</b></h2></a>
   1885 <blockquote><p>This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1886 
   1887 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.3.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.3</a> is based on
   1888 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/793>commit 793</a>. There
   1889 are now exactly 100 commands in defconfig (of a little over 220 on the
   1890 <a href=roadmap.html>todo list</a>).</p>
   1891 
   1892 <p>Elie De Brauwer added the rev command, cleaned up tac, implemented the -s
   1893 and -f flags for seq, added -v and -i to killall (and fixed killall not to
   1894 kill itself before finishing its pid list), and added to the test suite.
   1895 Felix Janda added -m to mkdir, pwd -L and -P, and more test suite entries.</p>
   1896 
   1897 <p>Rob Landley added the losetup command, and fixed the existing ls, cp, and
   1898 readlink commands. The segfault in ls
   1899 happened when it couldn't determine the screen size (last release changed the
   1900 default to -C and a screen size of 0 made column view unhappy), and cp got an
   1901 extensive rewrite bringing it up to date with the dirtree changes and fixing
   1902 a number of things it never did right in the first place. The xabspath()
   1903 code in the library now handles a symlink after ".." properly (and the test
   1904 suite checks for it).</p>
   1905 
   1906 <p>Infrastructure-wise the code is better about automatically setting the
   1907 error return code properly. Now error_msg() sets the exit code to 1 if it's
   1908 still defaulting to 0, and the global exit path does a fflush(NULL) with error
   1909 bit check rather than trying to be quite so granular about flushing. (That
   1910 means if we use printf() instead of xprintf() it still exits with the right
   1911 error code, it just doesn't end the program early on an output error.)
   1912 Minor bugfix so TOYBOX_DEBUG
   1913 doesn't always warn about the lack of suid bit when toybox is built with
   1914 at least one STAYROOT command. Bugfix for the option [grouping] logic
   1915 (and then further fixes to the error reporting pointed out by Ashwini Sharma).
   1916 dirtree_handle_callback() now has a prefix like the rest of the dirtree
   1917 functions. A lot of stuff doing manual path handling was switched to using
   1918 libc basename() (including, embarassingly, the basename command), which means
   1919 it now correctly detects "/trailing/slash/" which the previous code didn't.</p>
   1920 
   1921 <p>Also, last release included some accidentally checked in debug code that
   1922 disabled compiler optimization, so the binary size bloated a bit. It's back
   1923 to -Os by default now.</p>
   1924 
   1925 <a name="15-12-2012" /><a href="#15-12-2012"><hr><h2><b>December 15, 2012</b></h2></a>
   1926 <blockquote><p>"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
   1927 thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly
   1928 go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
   1929 </p><p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1930 
   1931 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.2.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.2</a> is based on
   1932 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/749>commit 749</a> and is
   1933 just a resync. Linux 3.7 came out, meaning it's time to do an Aboriginal
   1934 Linux release, and that should use a stable version of toybox. So here's
   1935 a new stable version.</p>
   1936 
   1937 <p>The new commands are cut (from Jason Kyungwan Han), touch
   1938 (from Choubey Ji), expand (from Jonathan Clairembault, and he fixed a
   1939 bug in login), and rm (from Rob Landley). Felix Janda added UTF-8
   1940 support infrastructure (for non-ascii character sets) with a config option.
   1941 Elie De Brauwer added tests for cat and sha1sum, and -so options to pidof.
   1942 The "ls" command defaults to -C (column view) now, and "readlink" now supports
   1943 -fenq.</p>
   1944 
   1945 <p>Portability work: toybox should now build against the musl C library,
   1946 and against older glibc versions (circa 2008, much before that and kernel
   1947 features we depend on start to drop out).</p>
   1948 
   1949 <p>The whole codebase got reindented from "one tab" to "two spaces" per
   1950 level. The option parsing logic now understands [groups] of commands (when more
   1951 than one in a group is selected it can switch the others off, or error out,
   1952 or other things). The error_exit() infrastructure can now longjmp back to an
   1953 earlier point instead of exiting. Each toys/* directory now has a README,
   1954 the first line of which is the fancy name menuconfig uses for the directory
   1955 (so no more hardwired directory list in scripts/genconfig.sh).</p>
   1956 
   1957 <p>Fixed a filehandle leak in getmountlist().
   1958 Pass parent pointer to dirtree_add_node() so it can give error messages with
   1959 full path. The yesno() function now always reads from stdin and writes to
   1960 stderr (we can retry tty checking complexity once we've got commands needing
   1961 it).</p>
   1962 
   1963 <p>The open group broke their website so the
   1964 <a href=http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>old links</a> to POSIX 2008
   1965 now <a href=http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>need to start with
   1966 pubs</a>. Some of the links in the tree have been updated, others haven't while
   1967 I wait to see if their webmaster notices and fixes it.</p>
   1968 
   1969 <p>(I note that the current rm implementation is not technically posix compliant
   1970 because the standard requires infinite recursion depth and the current
   1971 implementation uses one filehandle per level. I can add a config option
   1972 to do it Posix's way, which is more brittle and needs extra security checks,
   1973 but am waiting for somebody to complain first. The default "ulimit -n" is 1024
   1974 filehandles, so drilling down over 1000 nested subdirectories).</p>
   1975 
   1976 <a name="13-11-2012" /><a href="#13-11-2012"><hr><h2><b>November 13, 2012</b></h2></a>
   1977 <blockquote><p>"Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
   1978 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   1979 
   1980 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.1</a> is based on
   1981 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/691>commit 691</a>.</p>
   1982 
   1983 <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed usleep, Ashwini Kumar contributed du, and
   1984 Kyungwan Han contributed vconfig. Other new commands include switch_root and
   1985 md5sum, and the remaining shell wrappers are now proper commands (dos2unix,
   1986 unix2dos).</p>
   1987 
   1988 <p>The patch command now supports -l, and gethostname is now enabled by
   1989 default. The df command follows symlinks to get the actual device name.
   1990 Felix Janda added -m support to wc (for utf8).</p>
   1991 
   1992 <p>On the infrastructure side, the commands have now been grouped into
   1993 "posix", "lsb", and "other" subdirectories (for things required by Posix-2008,
   1994 the Linux Standard Base 4.1, and commands in neither). This affects menuconfig
   1995 and the actual source layout (toys/cp.c is now toys/posix/cp.c, and so on).
   1996 An android directory is planned (see the updated
   1997 <a href=roadmap.html#android>android roadmap analysis</a>).</p>
   1998 
   1999 <p>The FLAG_ macros for command option parsing and TT alias for the command's
   2000 global block are now automatically generated, commands should
   2001 #define FOR_commandname before #including <toys.h> to get the macros for that
   2002 command.</p>
   2003 
   2004 <p>An upgrade to the build infrastructure now allows commands with _ and -
   2005 in them, such as switch_root.</p>
   2006 
   2007 <p>Bugfixes: Avery Pennarun spotted a case where ls showed uid twice instead of
   2008 uid and gid, and that nice was using the wrong range of numbers.
   2009 The ls command also recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
   2010 properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
   2011 fixed. Roy Tam pointed out a glitch in sh, and fixed df's percentage
   2012 calculation to match the POSIX spec. The kernel build didn't like our mktemp
   2013 and it does now. The wc command wasn't quite posix compliant (trailing spaces
   2014 break stuff). The ls command recursed inappropriately last time (not quite
   2015 properly converted for the dirtree changes last release), and now it's
   2016 fixed. The catv command wasn't displaying byte 255 correctly. Some lib
   2017 fixes (thinko in xpidfile). Fixed uname -m when running a 32 bit x86 binary
   2018 on an x86-64 host (it lies and says the system is i686, i586, or i486 depending
   2019 on what the toolchain that built the binary supported. This makes builds in
   2020 a 32 bit chroot on a 64 bit kernel break less.) The df command was checking
   2021 partitions in the wrong order (displaying undermounts instead of overmounts:
   2022 this used to work but some library code changed out from under it and it
   2023 wasn't updated to match until now). Felix Janda filled out the test suite
   2024 some more. The patch file creation logic got tweaked several times to
   2025 successfully apply more patches. Support for older (pre 2.10) glibc
   2026 versions was added to portability.h.</p>
   2027 
   2028 <p>Miscelaneous cleanups all around (mknod, sha1sum, logname), including a
   2029 rewrite of taskset to be less dependent on libc getting the headers right. All
   2030 the command headers should now point to the current relevant standards
   2031 document, where applicable.</p>
   2032 
   2033 <p>This news page had old news entries from before the relaunch moved into
   2034 a separate <a href=oldnews.html>oldnews</a> page.</p>
   2035 
   2036 <p>I forgot to create <a href=bin>static binaries</a> last time, but they're
   2037 back now.</p>
   2038 </span>
   2039 
   2040 <a name="23-07-2012" /><a href="#23-07-2012"><hr><h2><b>July 23, 2012</b></h2></a>
   2041 <blockquote><p>"Ford", Arthur said. "There's an infinite number of monkeys
   2042 out here who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked
   2043 out." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   2044 
   2045 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.4.0</a> is based on
   2046 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/640>commit 640</a>.</p>
   2047 
   2048 <p>The new <a href=status.html>status page</a> is calculated from
   2049 the roadmap info, and should be easier to keep up to date in future.</p>
   2050 
   2051 <p>Andre Renaud contributed od and modinfo. Elie De Brauwer contributed
   2052 taskset, bugfixes to cmp and tail, and tests for sort and tail. Kyungwan Han
   2053 contributed passwd. Gaurang Shastri contributed w. Ashwini Sharma spotted a
   2054 case where dirtree was adding extra slashes to a path.</p>
   2055 
   2056 <p>I rewrote od, cleaned up comm, documented the
   2057 <a href=code.html#lib_llist>llist</a> and
   2058 <a href=code.html#lib_dirtree>dirtree</a> infrastructure, added an -r option
   2059 to date (and fixed a bug where -u wouldn't override /etc/localtime),
   2060 fixed bugs in chmod +stw, fixed ls to show suid bits properly when the
   2061 corresponding executable bit wasn't set, and worked around a longstanding
   2062 glibc bug where static linking prevents stdout from automatically flushing
   2063 pending output on exit.</p>
   2064 
   2065 <a name="25-06-2012" /><a href="#25-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 25, 2012</b></h2></a>
   2066 <blockquote><p>"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   2067 
   2068 <p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Toybox 0.3.1</a> is based on commit
   2069 <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/607>commit 607</a>. It's
   2070 mostly a bugfix release for ls -l (which was unhappy on targets other than
   2071 x86-64), plus a new "date" from Andre Renaud and rewritten chgrp/chown which
   2072 now support the full set of posix flags, plus a little work on the test
   2073 suite and some more header tweaks towards eventual compatability with the
   2074 musl libc.</p>
   2075 
   2076 <p>The todo list runneth over, but "release early, release often", so here
   2077 it is. The roadmap and documentation are a bit behind, and I've got ~40
   2078 pending submissions to review. I need to catch up...</p>
   2079 </span>
   2080 
   2081 <a name="12-06-2012" /><a href="#12-06-2012"><hr><h2><b>June 12, 2012</b></h2></a>
   2082 <blockquote><p>"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that
   2083 he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the
   2084 wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was
   2085 muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had
   2086 always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely
   2087 the same reasons." - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p></blockquote>
   2088 
   2089 <p>It's well past time for <a href=downloads/toybox-0.3.0.tar.bz2>toybox 0.3.0</a>,
   2090 so here it is, based
   2091 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/595>commit 595</a>, and the
   2092 statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt binaries</a> should
   2093 actually be statically linked this time (thanks Ashwini Sharma for spotting
   2094 that).</p>
   2095 
   2096 <p>It's hard to figure out where to cut a release, because development
   2097 doesn't stop. "Long before now" is the obviuos answer, of course.
   2098 The project's maintainer also moved house during this development cycle, which
   2099 threw things off for a bit (so many boxes). Releases should hopefully be a bit
   2100 more frequent from here on.</p>
   2101 
   2102 <p>The big things Rob worked on this time were the new dirtree (directory
   2103 tree traversal) infrastructure, and a complete rewrite of ls using that
   2104 which should now implement all 26 posix options.</p>
   2105 
   2106 <p>Georgi Chorbadzhiyski added printenv, whoami, mkdir, mkfifo, chmod, chown,
   2107 chgrp, and uniq. He also added fraction and extension support to sleep (so if
   2108 you need a quarter-second sleep, it can do that now), and fixed a build bug
   2109 on slackware.</p>
   2110 
   2111 <p>Daniel Walter contributed a string to mode_t parser (in use by chmod and
   2112 mkdir -m).  Ilya Kuzmich contributed comm. Elie De Brauwer added mountpoint,
   2113 vmstat, logname, login, and mktemp. Kevin Chase did some portability cleanups.
   2114 Pere Orga fixed some documentation.</p>
   2115 
   2116 <p>The "tac" and "clear" commands are now normal commands instead of shell
   2117 wrappers, and the header #includes have been cleaned up a bit to remove
   2118 deprecated functions and attempt to increase compatability with the bionic and
   2119 musl C libraries, "tail" should now use lseek() for large files, and "id" got
   2120 some cleanups and bugfixes.</p>
   2121 
   2122 <p>The new TOYBOX_FLOAT configuration option selects whether or not
   2123 to include floating point support (for embedded targets where that's
   2124 problematic).</p>
   2125 
   2126 <p>Several random bugfixes: unshare() might actually build portably now,
   2127 yes 'n' | cp -i should no longer bypass stdin and prompt via the tty, the
   2128 SUID support no longer drops permissions going through the toybox
   2129 multiplexer command, and a bugfix to xargs -0 means it should no longer
   2130 segfault. (I have a pending bug report about xargs not doing the full
   2131 posix whitespace handling that -0 obsoleted, but I'll deal with that next
   2132 release.)</p>
   2133 
   2134 <p>The build infrastructure is now automatically generating FLAG_ macros
   2135 for the options, but currently with the wrong names. Some more macro glue
   2136 is necessary, which I haven't quite figured out how to do yet.</p>
   2137 
   2138 <p>A defconfig toybox at the start of the $PATH has successfully built
   2139 Linux From Scratch (in my Aboriginal Linux project). The commands that
   2140 'default n' in the config are often still broken, cleanup is ongoing.
   2141 (The new dirtree stuff broke several of them that haven't been converted
   2142 yet, but if I wait until everything works we won't have a release before
   2143 1.0, so here's a checkpoint.)</p>
   2144 
   2145 
   2146 <a name="03-03-2012" /><a href="#03-03-2012"><hr><h2><b>March 3, 2012</b></h2></a>
   2147 
   2148 <blockquote><p>"They went unnoticed at Goonhilly, passed over Cape Canaveral
   2149 without a blip, and Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them.
   2150 Which was a pity, because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking
   2151 for all these years."</p></p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.</p>
   2152 </p></blockquote>
   2153 
   2154 <p>Here's <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.1.tar.bz2>toybox 0.2.1</a> based
   2155 on <a href=http://landley.net/hg/toybox/shortlog/512>commit 512</a>.  This
   2156 time around, there are statically linked <a href=downloads/binaries>prebuilt
   2157 binaries</a> for various embedded targets.</p>
   2158 
   2159 <p>It's been a busy few weeks, almost entirely due to new contributors. (I
   2160 have not quite been keeping up.)</p>
   2161 
   2162 <p>Elie De Brauwer contributed free, uptime, swapon, swapoff, lsmod, mknod,
   2163 insmod, rmmod, and fixed a bug in basename.  Andre Renaud contributed ls, ln,
   2164 realpath, and hostname. Andres Heck contributed pidof and killall.  Daniel
   2165 Walter wrote kill and extended id. Timothy Elliott contributed tail and tests
   2166 for cmp. Frank Bergmann sent a warning fix. Bryce Fricke added -i to cp.
   2167 Nathan McSween pointed out an optimization. Georgi Chorbadzhiyski fixed
   2168 cross compiling to work more reliably.</p>
   2169 
   2170 <p>(My own contribution this time around was just tightening up other people's
   2171 code, a build fix to unshare, some random bugfixes, and so on. My only new
   2172 code this time around was writing a bash replacement for the existing python
   2173 bloat-o-meter.)</p>
   2174 
   2175 <p>Last time (the 0.2.0 release) included the first pass at an id command from
   2176 Tim Bird, env and basename from Tryn Mirell, cmp and head from Timothy Elliott,
   2177 more bugfixes from Nathan McSween and Elie De Brauwer, and Luis Felipe Strano
   2178 Moraes did a first pass at the who command plus other bugfixes and
   2179 optimizations.</p>
   2180 
   2181 <p>(For that release I did xargs, cal, truncate, unlink, nohup, tty, wc, link,
   2182 dirname, unshare, and various infrastructure tweaks, but it took me 3 months
   2183 and those guys did their stuff in a week or so.)</p>
   2184 
   2185 
   2186 <a name="12-02-2012" /><a href="#12-02-2012"><hr><h2><b>February 12, 2012</b></h2></a>
   2187 <blockquote><p>
   2188 "for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at
   2189 least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two
   2190 important respects..."</p>
   2191 <p> - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p></blockquote>
   2192 
   2193 <p>Here's the first BSD licensed release,
   2194 <a href=downloads/toybox-0.2.0.tar.bz2>toybox-0.2.0</a>, more a synchronization
   2195 point than anything particularly useful.  47 commands in a reasonably
   2196 ready-to-use state (what "make defconfig" builds), another ten or so partially
   2197 finished stubs ("make allyesconfig"), and several
   2198 patches pending on the mailing list I need to review and merge.</p>
   2199 
   2200 <p>More to come...</p>
   2201 
   2202 <hr>
   2203 <a name="15-11-2011" /><a href="#15-11-2011"><hr><h2><b>November 15, 2011</b></h2></a>
   2204 - Back from the dead, Toybox is now under a 2
   2205 clause BSD license, and aiming to become the default command line
   2206 implementation of Android systems everywhere.</p>
   2207 
   2208 <p>More to come...</p>
   2209 
   2210 <hr>
   2211 
   2212 <p><a href=oldnews.html>Old news</a> from before the relaunch.</p>
   2213 
   2214 <!--#include file="footer.html" -->
   2215