Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
gitlab.alpinelinux.org
Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
1–10 of 87 posts
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#2This really looks like an example of open source done right. Obviously there are some strong opinions, but the person suggesting the change was pretty gracious about the pushback they got. Since then, stakeholders have had a chance to discuss and agree on a way forward. Nobody is trying to sweep all the "nasty bits" under the rug, like most developers tend to, and there's even mention of regression tests. I've seen few other projects (including but not limited to those where I was a maintainer) handle possibly-disruptive change so well. Kudos.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#3> The TSC has discussed this issue at today's meeting and has concluded that there is a general need to begin decoupling hardcoded preferences for BusyBox from the distribution.
Neat. I wonder if the general decoupling will make it eventually easy to drop in ex. toybox or one of the rust/golang coreutils implementations. Or, for that matter, to drop in GNU coreutils, since the current way to add those to Alpine strikes me as a little inelegant in comparison.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#4For the trivia, this is pushed by Laurent Bercot (skarnet), creator of s6, execline and many others. He's also working on implementing s6 as Alpine init and rc systems.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#5> The TSC has discussed this issue at today's meeting and has concluded that there is a general need to begin decoupling hardcoded preferences for BusyBox from the distribution. Neat. I wonder if the general decoupling will make it eventually easy to drop in ex. toybox or one of the rust/golang coreutils implementations. Or, for that matter, to drop in GNU coreutils, since the current way to add those to Alpine strik…
As far as I understand, this initiative is primarily about reducing hardcoded dependencies on Busybox. As such, this is indeed what would enable alternative implementations to exist cleanly alongside whatever is the default.
Because yeah, trying to change Alpine's init system, mdev, or other coreutils is indeed not easy/feasible at the moment.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#6This really looks like an example of open source done right. Obviously there are some strong opinions, but the person suggesting the change was pretty gracious about the pushback they got. Since then, stakeholders have had a chance to discuss and agree on a way forward. Nobody is trying to sweep all the "nasty bits" under the rug, like most developers tend to, and there's even mention of regression tests. I've seen f…
> and there's even mention of regression tests
I've been doing (mostly) full-coverage unit and integration testing since, oh... 2005? At least in the Ruby on Rails and now Elixir/Phoenix development spaces, it's absolutely de rigeur, and has probably saved me countless hours of debugging and simply not breaking stuff that already worked, or validating that things worked the way I expected them to.
The fact that in 2022 someone even has to qualify regression testing with an "even" (as in "EVEN mention of regression testing!") saddens me. Tests reduce developer pain and increase developer productivity, full stop. If you get hit by a bus, someone else who is working on your code will know they didn't break anything thanks to your test suite. Get with the program, folks, it's been decades now since this was known.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#7That's not what I read in the link:
> More generally, and this is more a matter of opinion and totally debatable, I would like functionality to be progressively stripped from busybox-initscripts, which is a package that gathers a bunch of miscellaneous policy scripts that are only related by the fact that their mechanism is provided by busybox. I don't think this package makes sense from a semantics point of view; it is more logical to provide the policy scripts classified by service, no matter whether or not the implementation of the service is done by busybox. To me, ideally, busybox-initscripts would be empty, and we'd have virtual packages for every service that is currently defined in it, so support for alternative implementations can be added over time. This would also ease the path to getting out of busybox, or at least providing alternative coreutils/low-level utilities implementations, is there is ever a will from Alpine to do so.
So it sounds like they just want to change how the scripts are packaged. The only mention of getting away from busybox is at the end, which is qualified with "[if] there is ever a will from Alpine to do so".
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#8This really looks like an example of open source done right. Obviously there are some strong opinions, but the person suggesting the change was pretty gracious about the pushback they got. Since then, stakeholders have had a chance to discuss and agree on a way forward. Nobody is trying to sweep all the "nasty bits" under the rug, like most developers tend to, and there's even mention of regression tests. I've seen f…
> and there's even mention of regression tests I've been doing (mostly) full-coverage unit and integration testing since, oh... 2005? At least in the Ruby on Rails and now Elixir/Phoenix development spaces, it's absolutely de rigeur, and has probably saved me countless hours of debugging and simply not breaking stuff that already worked, or validating that things worked the way I expected them to. The fact that in 20…
It saddens me too, but it still seems necessary. In my (quite long and varied) experience, most developers do not appreciate the value of regression tests. Therefore, reminders and positive reinforcement are still beneficial.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#9That's not what I read in the link: > More generally, and this is more a matter of opinion and totally debatable, I would like functionality to be progressively stripped from busybox-initscripts, which is a package that gathers a bunch of miscellaneous policy scripts that are only related by the fact that their mechanism is provided by busybox. I don't think this package makes sense from a semantics point of view; it…
From Ariadne's update:
> The TSC [..] has concluded that there is a general need to begin decoupling hardcoded preferences for BusyBox from the distribution.
That's a bit stronger than just "we want to reorganize our script packaging". It still isn't explicitly "reducing dependencies on Busybox", but removing hardcoded dependencies is a prerequiste for the former.
Re: Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox
#10For the trivia, this is pushed by Laurent Bercot (skarnet), creator of s6, execline and many others. He's also working on implementing s6 as Alpine init and rc systems. https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ https://skarnet.com/projects/service-manager.html
They're really still going through with that? I didn't expect I'd have to find another distro so soon.