1 <html><head><title>toybox news</title> 2 <!--#include file="header.html" --> 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&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
