[dev] [sbase] Defining scope of sbase and ubase

From: Roberto E. Vargas Caballero <k0ga_AT_shike2.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2024 06:40:37 +0100

Hi,

While reviewing several patches for sbase adding new tools
some discussion happened and I thought it was better to move the
discussion here.

The patches raised a concern about what should be the scope of
sbase. The idea of sbase was to provide a minimal portable POSIX
base, while having ubase for the POSIX commands that cannot be
implemented in a portable way. Saying that, it is obvious that
there are programs in sbase that are not part of POSIX:

        - md5sum
        - sha256sum
        - sha384sum
        - sha512sum
        - sponge
        - sync
        - tar
        - install

and maybe some others. At this point is not clear to me what to do
with tools like tac or shuf. There was a small discussion about
this topic in the irc channel, and it was proposed to add a 3rd
repository to contain all these tools that are not part of POSIX
(a bit like the moretools package). From my point of view, the
main drawback of it is that it requires a 3rd -box program (currently
we have sbase-box and ubase-box). The current situation it not good,
because the two -box are not sharing the library, and the disk space
is duplicated (main reason of -box is to minimize disk space for
restricted environments), and a 3rd -box would make the situation
even worse. But in the other hand, I don't want to add more non
POSIX tools in sbase (in fact, I personally would like to remove
the current non POSIX tools).

I would like to move the discussion here and see what alternatives
we have and how to proceed in this case.

Regards,
Received on Fri Mar 08 2024 - 06:40:37 CET