[yocto] Removing busybox

[Tom Rini]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 11:40:37PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 03:09:02PM -0500, Tom Rini wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 09:06:38PM +0100, Jean-Christian de Rivaz wrote:
> >...
> > > So as expected systemd is there and busybox is not. But there is a lot of
> > > useful commands missing on the resulting QEMU image:
> > > 
> > > root at qemux86:~# ps
> > > ~sh: ps: command not found
> > > root at qemux86:~# w
> > > ~sh: w: command not found
> > > root at qemux86:~# find
> > > ~sh: find: command not found
> > > root at qemux86:~# grep
> > > ~sh: grep: command not found
> > > root at qemux86:~# ip addr
> > > ~sh: ip: command not found
> > > 
> > > I expected that all the limited busybox commands would be replaced by
> > > the full
> > > featured commands. How to fix that ?
> > 
> > Correct, you're missing a lot of stuff.  Somewhere on my (and other
> > folks too) TODO list is a packagegroup that includes procps and psmisc
> > and grep and tar and various network packages and less and more and...
> 
> "all the limited busybox commands would be replaced" would be a huge 
> list from dc through gawk, minicom and wget to vim.
> 
> And would vim-tiny qualify as "the full featured command" of busybox vi,
> or should this include vim with full features?

What to suggest in the busybox-replacement group is a bit of a challenge
as to how far you want to really push things, yes.

> The nice thing about busybox is that it is so small,
> in many cases one full featured command alone
> is bigger than busybox.
> 
> It is not obvious to me what usecases people have in mind for
> getting rid of busybox, and whether everyone is aware that
> something like "all busybox commands replaced" is *very*
> expensive regarding filesystem size.

The use case for not having busybox installed is something like the
project I'm doing where I have 4G of disk space to dedicate to "give me
something like a standard Linux environment".  Since I need to replace
less (doesn't work with systemd PAGER), and I want my usual arguments to
'ps' to work, and then a handful of other things, I want the full
regular versions of utils, and at that point, I want "command not found"
as a reminder to grab what I really want not busybox doing it for me.

All that said, I am a huge fan of busybox when I need to save space.  I
have and continue to push back when customers ask about dropping busybox
for non-technical grounds.  It's also just true that not every case of
an OE use is somewhere that busybox is the best fit.

-- 
Tom
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