News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox. Parent comment

Re:Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox by senzilla on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @05:35PM (#32336903)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox by blueflow on Thursday August 04, 2022 @07:50AM (#32341676)
You can already install coreutils and udev over busybox, without busybox being removed.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox by skarnet on Friday August 05, 2022 @08:08AM (#32354931)
And if you look under the hood, you will see that it's only possible because of a bunch of ad-hoc hacks, which is exactly what my proposal was about: level the playing field and make it possible to have alternatives _without_ the ad-hoc hacks.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox by blueflow on Saturday August 06, 2022 @04:33PM (#32371359)
Are you referring to the busybox symlink farm?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox by skarnet on Friday August 12, 2022 @02:41AM (#32435294)
Not at all. I'm referring to the structure of the Alpine packaging, especially around boot scripts, that hardcodes busybox in a number of places and makes it difficult to package an alternative without workarounds - which accumulates tech debt.
[ Parent | on HN ]