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See the links on the left for details.</p> <h2>News</h2> -<a name="18-10-2019" /><a href="#18-10-2019"><hr><h2><b>October 18, 2019</b></h2></a> -<blockquote> -<p>"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real -men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri -were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." -</p> <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> -</blockquote> - -<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.2.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.2</a> -(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.2>git commit</a>) -is finally out (only two months late).</p> - -<p>The new commands this time are minor variants of existing ones -(<b>dnsdomainname</b> is hostname -d, <b>arch</b> is uname -m), but about -1/3 of toysh got implemented in pending, <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> got merged as a "make root" target (see Build), -and Android's <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2019-August/010845.html>hermetic build</a> -work continued resulting in a lot of fixes.</p> - -<p>The android-specific <b>getprop</b>, <b>setprop</b>, <b>start</b>, and <b>stop</b> -commands were removed from toybox because they grew dependencies on android -libraries, and since toybox tries to avoid mandatory external dependencies -they moved to another package.</p> - -<p><u>Build</u>: -The new "make root" target builds a simple toybox root filesystem, -using scripts/mkroot.sh which is a stripped -down version of the external <a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> -project merged into toybox. (Alas, at the moment it wants sh and route out -of pending, which aren't quite load bearing yet.)</p> - -<p>The new "scripts/mcm-buildall.sh" convenience script builds cross -compilers based on gcc+musl multiple targets (arm, x86, mips, m68k, s390, -microblaze...) -using <a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>, -and a new scripts/cross.sh to easily cross compile for one or more targets -using the resulting compilers. (This works with "make root", "make -toybox", and other builds understanding the CROSS_COMPILE environment variable.)</p> - -<p>Setting the environment variable ASAN=1 enables the -llvm address sanitizer. (You may need to -export ASAN_SYMBOLIZER_PATH on debian to use it, they add the version number to -the filename in /usr/bin which confuses llvm.)</p> - -<p>Patrick Oppenlander fixed make -j (our make is a wrapper around -scripts/make.sh which was already doing a parallel build, but if you called -make with -j it wouldn't wait for make.sh to finish and the build broke).</b> - -<p>Lots of fixes for the MacOS build.</p> - -<p><u>New options</u>: -We upgraded <b>tar</b> to extract some older tarballs, <b>file</b> added -b and -s -options and can also recognize older tarballs, -some xz archives, .otf fonts, perf/simpleperf data files, -android boot images, and dtb files. Upgraded <b>file</b> to show the device type -for block and char devices, the target for symlinks, and it says _why_ it can't -open a file.</p> - -<p>Several commands ignore some options rather than erroring on them: -<b>patch</b> ignores the -f -g# and --no-backup-if-mismatch options -(all of which we were already doing by default anyway), and <b>xargs</b> -ignores -P# (which requests parallel execution, maybe add it later but -single threading works), and Denys Nykula made <b>wget</b> ignore ---no-check-ceritificate and <b>gzip</b> ignore -n (again, we weren't doing -either anyway) to satisfy pkgsrc.</p> - -<p>William Haddon taught <b>diff</b> and <b>patch</b> to support special characters in path -names (via quoting) and more timestamp formats. -Eric Molitor implemented <b>nl</b> -v (with negative and zero starting values), -and fixed a MacOS compatibility issue in the build scripts. -Tom Cherry added <b>netcat</b> -U (UNIX domain socket support). -Denys Nykula taught <b>wget</b> to call ftpget for ftp:// URLs. -Ethan Sommer added ln -t and rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty. -Elliott Hughes added <b>grep</b> -R, <b>killall</b> -w, tar --mode, - fixed <b>ls</b> -Z and spacing in -lZ and --full-time, -added <b>xargs</b> --max-args and removed xargs -I (which we never actually -supported) and tweaked the size calculation to more closely match other -versions, -added xargs -o and made -p read from /dev/tty, added <b>blkid</b> -s, SEC_TYPE for ext3, -msdos, and ntfs, f2fs and ntfs LABEL, fixed vfat/ntfs UUID, and switched -the endianness for UUID of msdos/ntfs/vfat, simplified the octal mode -display in <b>lsof</b>, added <b>pidof</b> -x (thus making the default behavior _not_ -be -x).</p> - -<p>When readdir() succeeds but stat() fails, <b>ls</b> now prints "??? ? ? filename" -entries instead of "cannot access" errors. (Still trying to make ls / on -android work more gracefully with the SELinux weirdness they added in 9.)</p> - -<p>Added %C to <b>stat</b> and made it show device type in its default output, -<b>cmp</b> now works -with 1 argument (implicit - as second argument reading from stdin). -<b>sed</b> added exit codes to the q command (q123), added Q, and fixed a -bad error message with "!". -Removed TAIL_SEEK config option (it just always does that now), -<b>find</b> grew several new options (%Z, -true, -false, and -newerXY), <b>ln</b> added -T. -The argument to <b>mktmp</b> --tmpdir is now optional.</p> - -<p><u>Bugfixes</u>: -The unshare probe bit-rotted so it was impossible to build <b>unshare</b> -and <b>nsenter</b> on some distros. -Commit 771e94e2a08 broke toybox's ability to say "unknown command" when -you pointed a symlink at it that it that didn't correspond to a command, -pointing a symlink at another symlink -to make toybox run a command under a name it doesn't recognize -(ln -s toybox sh; ln -s sh ash) had an off by one error, -<b>ifconfig</b> no longer error_exits if the "read mac address" ioctl fails (Android N -and later block that for non-root users to prevent device tracking). -When the libcrypto library was disabled, md5sum was building commands it -hasn't got built-in support for yet (like sha3sum) which acted like redundant -copies of md5sum, -<b>tar</b> wasn't correctly reading or writing sparse files with a hole at -the end, and tar tzf blah.tar.xz was calling xz when it meant xzcat, -<b>xargs</b> would spuriously fail on large memory systems (due to a missing -"unsigned" in a typecast), -<b>basename</b> can now remove suffixes starting with a dash, -<b>cp</b> -r unlinks() an existing symlink before trying to -recreate the symlink (otherwise cp -r into an existing directory will -try to follow the existing symlink and create another symlink at its -destination, failing if a file already exists there, which -was confusing gentoo's package manager), <b>timeout</b> now produces the -right exit code when the timed command intercepts the exit signal, -and <b>hostname</b> -d no longer segfaults on machines with no domain name.</p> - -<p>Denys Nykula fixed the <b>ftpget</b> freeze (it was sending REST instead -of RETR), made <b>mv</b> work with a trailing slash in the source, -fixed a <b>find</b> segfault, -and made <b>env</b> always exec rather than recursing to a builtin -(on the theory #!/usr/bin/env is expected to search the $PATH).</p> - -<p>Elliott improved <b>killall</b>'s handling of long filenames, made <b>kill</b> work -when killall5 is disabled (missing FORCE_FLAGS), fixed error reporting in -<b>hostname</b>, fixed several things in <b>xargs</b>, -made <b>printf</b> \c and \0 octal escapes work, fixed a <b>find</b> -name corner -case (find src/*.c -name file.c) and find dangling symlink behavior, -made some <b>rm</b> error messages consistent, fixed \x behavior in echo and -printf, fixed linestack.c's buffer length for utf8 U+XXXX escape printing, -fixed a race in <b>losetup</b>, fixed <b>grep</b> -F with multiple matches on the same -line and an -I failure in the existing grep tests, made <b>readlink</b> notice -when it has more than one argument, and made various -fixes to <b>modinfo</b>.</p> - -<p>Ethan Sommer reported that <b>stat</b> of an suid/sticky file output 5 digits of -octal stat date instead of 4. -Rob fixed an unaligned access in <b>grep</b>. Alessio Balsini removed an incorrect -null termination in <b>losetup</b>. -Jarno Mäkipää fixed <b>hexedit</b> -scrolling up and down on older terminals, and fixed <b>ls</b> segfaulting with a broken -(non-UTF8) locale (didn't expect wcrtomb to return -1). -Andrew Ilijic made ls put 2 spaces between columns like other implementations -(which helps when terminals get confused and apply UTF8 combining characters -to the space after a filename). -</p> - -<p><u>Library</u>: -Added dlist_lpop() to use a dlist as a stack (it removes the last entry -instead of the first), and dlist_pop() now works on a dlist_terminate()d list. -DIRTREE_STATLESS returns entries we couldn't stat() (with a zeroed ->st -field, and ->again |= 2), but filling in the file type from readdir(). -Coversions between signal names and numbers now include all the Linux signals, -not just posix ones. The functions sig_to_num() and num_to_sig() moved into -lib/portability.h, because MacOS has different signals. -TOYFLAG_MAYFORK allows commands to run in toysh's process without forking, -but also makes them accessable from the toybox multiplexer or standalone. -A MAYFORK command has to clean up after itself (even in error paths) and -can't discard anything we need to keep (such as closing stdout).</p> - -<p>Elliott did a big xbind/xconnect cleanup (adding xbindany and xconnectany), -taught xregcomp that an empty regex matches the whole line -(because FreeBSD, and thus MacOS, doesn't already do that), and -replaced several uses of get_line() (which does single byte reads) -with getline() (which doesn't).</p> - -<p><u>Plumbing</u>: -"make clean" doesn't produce a screenful of unnecessary output now, -rm, ln, cp, kill, and netcat use the FLAG() macros now, makedevs uses the new -GLOBALS naming format, timeout now uses xwaitpid(), and we fixed an -off by one error in xwaitpid().</p> - -<p>Elliott removed a workaround for old NDK versions from getconf and -moved sort off of get_rawline() (which let us remove it). -Rob undid some loop unrolling in md5sum/sha1sum (we have libcrypto if you want -an assembly optimized version instead of an understandable version).</p> - -<p>Android ndk-r20 doesn't define the __ANDROID_NDK__ symbol, so we switched -to using clang's __has_include() (which is an undefined macro and thus a NOP -resolving to false on gcc).</p> - -<p><u>Pending</u>: -Rob did a lot of work on toysh: continuation support works (it knows when to ask -for another line of text and when to run what it's got), as do -nested if/else/elif statements, and while and for loops (supporting "for i" -and "for i in", but not for ((;;)) yet). -It parses pipes and redirections but doesn't perform them yet. -The next big todo chunk is environment variable resolution. -</p> - -<p>Gavin Howard fixed some bugs in bc, such as not returning error when raising -zero to a negative power. -Jarno Mäkipää continues to extend vi, adding yank and push, support for tabs, -rewriting delete, changing the drawing code, etc. Elliott also added several -fixes and features to vi, -fixed host to cope with large DNS responses, switched crontab to -use getline(), did work on man, fixed fixed several things in dd, -implemented diff --strip-trailing-cr and made diff not need /tmp. -Mike Bennett added extended attribute support to ip.c's route change.</p> - -<p><u>Test suite</u>: The killall and pgrep tests were having occasional -spurious failures due to a race condition (the test script would fork() -to call sleep and for just a moment there were two instances of the test -script, reporting an extra process if killall or pgrep ran then). - -<p>Elliott Hughes did a lot of work on the test suite: add kill -l tests, -make losetup.test notice (and skip) if loopback -devices area already in use, blkid.test can TEST_HOST e2fsprogs blkid now, -modinfo.test notices (and skips) if there's no /proc/modules or modules -directory, ifconfig.test skips if "dummy0 up" fails and disabled the -pointtopoint tests entirely (the kernel never supported it?), -truncate.test is less -confused by SELinux, hostname.test can run some tests as non-root, -addressed a race condition in killall.test on slow systems, -made chgrp.test, chown.test, and tar.test handle an empty /etc/passwd or /etc/group -(we were checking whether they were _there_ but some android devics have -empty ones), -fixed a couple things in env.test, extended killall.test to explicitly cover -long and short names (and not assume the shell is /bin/sh), taught split.test not to rely on bash process substitution, -added missing TZ=utc to touch.test, fixed cp.test to pass for root -or with a restrictive umask, and fixed the FAILCOUNT arithmetic to use more portable -$(()). Elliott also made some tests more flexible (find.test can handle any -error message about symlink loops, etc), and disabled others (such as du) -when SELinux is enabled.</p> - -<p>Rob taught testcmd not to use the shell builtin for TEST_HOST unless there -isn't one in the $PATH, work if $PWD has a space in it, -and make kill.test stop testing the shell builtin -insead of the command, quieted tests that were producing output -other than their PASS/FAIL line, and made NOSPACE tests ignore the -presence/absence of leading/trailing whitespace as well as differences -in the amount of space.</p> - -<p><u>Documentation</u>: -The <a href=roadmap.html>roadmap</a> got freshened up a bit, with updates -for android from Elliott. -In <a href=design.html>the design page</a> the Features section starts with -4 new paragraphs about the scope of toybox, and a new License section talks -about 0BSD. -The "./toybox --help" output now explains how to do install_flat by hand.</p> - -<p><u>Sheer pedantry</u>: -Elliott fixed a double close in loopfiles_lines() so strace doesn't -have an EBADF in it, and added a missing "static" in lib/net.c.</p> - -<a name="21-05-2019" /><a href="#21-05-2019"><hr><h2><b>May 21, 2019</b></h2></a> -<blockquote> -<p>"I like the cover," he said. "'Don't Panic.' It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."</p> <p>- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</p> -</blockquote> - -<p><a href=downloads/toybox-0.8.1.tar.gz>Toybox 0.8.1</a> -(<a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/releases/tag/0.8.1>git commit</a>) -is out.</p> - -<p>Android is now using toybox as part of a <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-November/009824.html>"hermetic" build</a> -(meaning Android is building under toybox, which is halfway to Android -building under Android). See Android's <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/build-tools/+log>build-tools</a> and <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/soong/+log>soong</a> repositories to follow along with development, or check the list for the <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2019-May/010485.html>current status</a>.</p> - -<p><u>New commands</u>: Isaac Dunham added <b>mcookie</b>, which is used by -X11. Elliott Hughes added <b>devmem</b>, which replaces toolbox's "r".</p> - -<p><u>Promoted</u>: <b>tar</b>, <b>gunzip</b>, and <b>zcat</b> were cleaned -up and moved out of pending. -Tar is a near-rewrite with support for --owner --group and --sparse, -capable of autodetecting "wget blah.tar.bz2 -O - | tar xv", a --restrict option -that only allows files to extract into a single subdirectory, and so on.</p> - -<p><u>Added to pending</u>: -Jarno Mäkipää contributed a new <b>vi</b> implementation. Makepost added -<b>man</b>.</p> - -<p><u>Updates</u>: Elliott added <b>find</b> -wholename/-iwholename, -printf, -and -context, <b>grep</b> --exclude-dir, and <b>echo</b> -E. -Rob added <b>blkid</b> -U and -L, <b>mount</b> now has UUID= support via blkid -U, -you can now specify TZ="blah" in the <b>date</b> -d input string (although -why the double quotes are required is an open question), and <b>sed</b> now -understands ,+N relative ranges. Makepost added <b>rm</b> -v. -The human_readable fields in <b>ps</b>/<b>top</b>/<b>iotop</b> now use all -available space to show more precision, <b>iotop</b> displays swap bandwidth -properly (it was showing a signed field as unsigned), and -<b>touch</b> -t and -d autodetect the time format.</p> - -<p><u>Cleanups</u>: In pending Rob did some bc cleanup, -Colin Davidson did some arp cleanup, -Uros Prestor fixed route argument parsing, and -in bc Daniel Rosenberg fixed bc_vec_concat()'s allocation and -Gavin Howard fixed an overflow bug in bc_num_ulong().</p> - -<p>Elliott made scan_key() detect cursor keys and such with several more -terminal types, made more better about directories and non-tty output, -cleaned up inconsistent uses of ARRAY_LEN(), taught file -to recognize a c-sky ELF machine, and fixed timezone and daylight -savings time issues in date and its tests. -Rob simplified netcat and ping using new lib/net.c infrastructure. -When run as non-PID 1 (for a chroot) oneit's exit code now indicates -which signal it's exiting due to. -Hadrian Węgrzynowski #defined constants for mkpathat. -Date now uses the current time for unspecified fields (instead of zeroing -them), and should set the weekday properly. -Sort's -k2.3,4.5 syntax is now documented and behaves more closely to -other implementations (silly as that behavior is). -Significant speedup to sed s/a/b/g on a megabyte long line (it was -O(n^2) and now it's quite snappy).</p> - -<p>Several cases of warning about stdout failing to write were silenced -because things like piping the output to head means stdout is a special -case: its output is often discarded and that's fine. And xprintf() -and friends only checks stdout for errors so it can exit early ("yes | head" -should not spin endlessly) without actually flushing anything. -There's an ongoing design debate about line buffering stdin and stdout -that'll have to be resolved next dev cycle.</p> - -<p><u>Bugs</u>: -Elliott sent in a lot of fixes for building AOSP with toybox: -support for more date formats, sed substitution of empty capture groups -and an endless loop with -EPIPE, fixed find -path/-ipath, made loggit() -only feed LOG_AUTH to syslog when we have a tty, gave grep a bunch -of --longname synonyms for short options, added getfattr --only-values, -and timeout --foreground --preserve-status and --signal.</p> - -<p>Top got a lot of tweaks: it no longer collates thread's CPU usage into the -parent thread (in -H mode), hides the cursor in interactive mode, updates the -display properly in batch mode, and accepts ENTER -as a synonym for SPACE when refreshing the display. The header lines -now abbreviate long numbers with units (via human_readable()), -more reliably spans the terminal width, and says "Thread" instead -of "Task" when it's showing threads. The task/thread count now adds up -(understanding more kernel states and treating unknown ones as "sleeping"). -Top now treats -o "" as an error (previously it displayed an empty screen).</p> - -<p>William Djupström pointed out login needs to chown() the tty, and made it -clear the environment when -p is absent. -Vidar Holen fixed inverted find -exec exit status. -Rob made chgrp() stop relying on libc's printf("%s", NULL) printing "(null)" -because a <a href=https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/issues/2879>newly added gcc bug</a> turns that into a build break, and -fixed an outright embarassing xstrndup() bug. -Liwugang fixed a segfault when stat's format string had a trailing %. -A missing else in grep meant -x was sometimes ignored.</p> - -<p><u>Infrastructure</u>: -in the build scripts/portability.sh now tests that the compiler it's trying -to use exists up front. We no longer link against librt because on glibc that's -pulling in libpthread for some unknown reason.</p> - -<p>TOYFLAG_ARGFAIL() lets commands return custom exit values when option parsing -fails (because AOSP build scripts cared), so timeout --unknown returns 125 -and so on: chroot, diff, cmp, env, grep, nohup, and sort also use it now with -various values.</p> - -<p>New FLAG() macros: FLAG(x) expands to (toys.optflags&FLAG_x) and returns -zero if the command line argument's bit isn't set and nonzero if it is -(meaning -x was or wasn't encountered on the command line this time by -lib/args.c). Lots of commands got converted to use them.</p> - -<p>New lib/env.c with reset_env(), xsetenv(), and xunsetenv() which frees -the old environment variable when it wasn't inherited from exec(). This -lets long-running loops reset environment variables without memory leaks.</p> - -<p>New xnotify() plumbing in lib/portability.c with Linux and Mac versions -(which should also work on BSD).</p> - -<p>New xparsedate() and xvali_date() functions allow date, tar --mtime, and -touch to understand the same date formats, -xpopen_both() now knows how to use existing filehandles for the child's -stdin/stdout, and no longer redirects stderr (which hides errors), -new nanomove(), nanodiff(), union socksaddr, xrecvwait(), -and human_readable_long() to show more than 3 digits of output.</p> - -<p>Taught xgetaddrinfo() to return a wildcard address for a NULL host, -xconnbind() sets SO_REUSEADDR by default, -fileunderdir() returns the abspath to the file now (since we had to work -it out anyway), and -xabspath() uses O_PATH now (because Android's SELinux rules got more aggressive).</p> - -<p>Several new xsendfile() variants, including sendfile_len() to copy -a specific amount of data and xsendfile_pad() to append zeroes to the -output when there isn't enough input.</p> - -<p>regexec0() is now using libc's REG_STARTEND supported by every libc out -there _except_ musl. (It originated in BSD and was adopted by glibc, bionic, -and uClibc 15 years ago, and is also supported in macosx. Musl's maintainer -<a href=https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2013/01/15/26>turned down</a> -the feature request as an invalid use case he didn't think they should -be trying to do.)</p> - -<p><u>Docs</u>: -the <a href=license.html>license page</a> now has an SPDX identifier, and links to more -history/context. The actual LICENSE file had its title line removed -so <a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-463746027>github could recognize it</a> as 0BSD. (We're still waiting for -"<a href=https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/pull/643#issuecomment-464380789>a while</a>" to pass before github actually does, though.)</p> - -<p>A new www/doc/mount.txt file describes how mount works under the covers.</p> - -<p>Rob consistently misspelled "canonical" and "millisecond", mountpoint -has a synopsis now, -Kevin van der Kamp fixed a typo in netstat's help text, and Elliott -Hughes fixed typos everywhere and made the tense, capitalization, and -punctuation of help text more consistent.</p> - -<p>New paragraph in the code style part of design.html explaining that -"char* a, b;" is not how C works, and since you wind up with "char *a, b;" -anyway you might as well say that.</p> - -<p>Given dreamhost's tendency to repeatedly delete the mailing list -archive, the nav bar on the left links to a backup web archive now too.</p> - -<p>The FAQ now says why we do time based releases.</p> - -<p><u>Testing</u>: Added VERBOSE=nopass to not show passing tests. -The test suite now does an rm -rf on testdir between each command so -debris files don't accumulate. -New skipnot function skips the next test if a command line fails, and -toyonly function only runs command when we're testing the toybox version -of command. (This isn't the same as TEST_HOST, the host version could be -toybox.) -The find -newer test calls "sleep .1" to avoid intermittently failing with an -identical timestamp. -Elliott added the start of a file.test rogues gallery. -No longer call lsattr in "make tests" because the behavior differs by -filesystem and it needs fixing somehow.</p> - <a name="08-02-2019" /><a href="#08-02-2019"><hr><h2><b>February 8, 2019</b></h2></a> <blockquote> <p>"Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified |