Minutes of GNU/kFreeBSD IRC meeting 20050731

[Robert Millan]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:46:18AM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> >>   - busybox (nyu will try to port it during its holidays)
> >
> >
> >Also done.  I'll send the patch to upstream soon.
> 
> Is it fully ported, or did you disabled some parts of the source?

busybox is not the kind of package that can be "fully ported".  It includes
lots of very Linux-specific commands and features.  Some of them would need a
complete rewrite to work on *BSD kernels.

In bug #323670, you can see a list of config options that had to be disabled
(the upstream files have a similar list, but I think it is the same diff).

>From that list, maybe some of them can be recovered:

  - dmesg can be rewritten portably by reading from _PATH_KLOG, but you need
    to hack some workarounds if you want it to:  work more than once,  be
    runable as user, etc.
  - Guillem ported fdisk for util-linux.  Maybe his work can be reused.
  - ping and ping6 are written portably in inetutils.  I haven't checked bb's
    in depth.
  - swapon and swapoff rely on kernel calls that are almost the same, but
    probably contain other unportable stuff.
  - uptime should work via /proc, but they're probably using sysconf or the
    like instead.

-- 
Robert Millan