from Hacker News

Alpine Linux is reducing dependencies on Busybox

by senzilla on 8/3/22, 8:11 PM with 82 comments

• by g051051 on 8/3/22, 9:36 PM

  That'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".

• by rahen on 8/3/22, 9:17 PM

  For 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

• by notacoward on 8/3/22, 8:34 PM

  This 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.

• by yjftsjthsd-h on 8/3/22, 8:53 PM

  > 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.

• by LAC-Tech on 8/3/22, 10:12 PM

  I really like alpine linux. I used it as my WSL2 env for years. I run Void Linux on actual hardware these days (better to use photon for games than WSL2 for work), but would probably switch back to alpine if it had more packages and rolling release, as it had the best package manager I had ever used.

• by octoberfranklin on 8/3/22, 11:36 PM

  Editorialized title is extremely misleading.

  At most, this MR is reducing dependencies on busybox's init scripts.

  A far more accurate title would be the title of the MR itself: "main/mdevd: make it a fully supported alternative to mdev". The MR is mainly about mdev.

• by freemint on 8/3/22, 10:22 PM

  Good.

• by gtirloni on 8/3/22, 10:31 PM

  Do not editorialize submissions.