Replacing GNU with other stuff

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-12 09:37:30

Hi all I just made a package for fun replacing GNU coreutils with corresponding busybox utilitiies.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48187

To my great surprise, I could boot and login to KDE on my experimental system! It would be great if others also would like to play with this and suggest improvements.

What other GNU stuff in base and/or base-devel might be possible to replace?

Other alternatives han busybox? Heirloom? 9base?

EDIT: a Freudian mispelling of "busybox"

Last edited by W.F.Cody (2011-04-19 19:55:53)

Ramses de Norre · 2011-04-12 10:33:26

Why do you want to do this?

dolby · 2011-04-12 10:35:40

You can probably replace most of them. Not bash though cause the initscripts contain bashisms. There was an effort to get rid of them but in the end it was decided it was worthless.
See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16807 for groff, GCC with LLVM, Glibc with Eglibc and Gawk with Mawk (like Debian does), GRUB with Syslinux are the ones i remember offhand.

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-12 12:11:48

@Ramses

Mostly because of curiosity "can it be done?"
The second motivation could be pro-choice pro-diversity sentiments (after all one thing that makes Arch great is customization and the fewer "compulsory" packages the better).

EDIT: Another potential use, at least for base2busybox replacement packages is that one could make a meta-package where all packages that can be replaced by corresponding Busybox symlinks get replaced. This will give you a truly light-weight and minimal system (some people like that, and replacing coreutils with Busybox will save you approx 16MiB (!)).

Last edited by W.F.Cody (2011-04-19 17:20:58)

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-19 10:39:29

For the adventourous out there:

I have just uploaded a gnu2heirloom coreutils package (some backup from busybox needed) with the "posix2001" profile. Other profiles ["sysv", "posix", "ucb" and "s42"] can relatively easily be made following the same procedure.

I will test booting my experimental system with this package this evening.
Feel free to play, and feedback is welcome

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48339

EDIT: I tested it, and this package is also able to boot. There are some functions of coreutils that are not covered by Heirloom or Busybox which may lead to trouble in some cases but I have not noticed anythin yet.
Have fun!

Last edited by W.F.Cody (2011-04-19 15:27:26)

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-20 09:08:14

I put up a wiki for base2busybox if people are interested in evolving this idea
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Base2busybox

upsidaisium · 2011-04-20 09:29:16

Ramses de Norre wrote:

Why do you want to do this?

Some people don't necessarily like coreutils (or much of anything from GNU).

9base or the userland from one of the BSDs would be nice.

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-20 09:56:24

upsidaisium wrote:

Ramses de Norre wrote:
Why do you want to do this?
Some people don't necessarily like coreutils (or much of anything from GNU).
9base or the userland from one of the BSDs would be nice.

That can indeed also be a reason to try replacing stuff. Personally, I am just in favour of the ability to choose and a "monoculture" is always bad (after all, pretty boring that all linux distributions except embedded ones are GNU/Linux distributions). I am personally not per se anti GNU but I would still like to see more diversity.

For a BSD/Linux variant: the ucb profile* of gnu2heirloom should be pretty close to this and is one package I am going to try to assemble relatively soon. On top of that, there are a number of other interesting BSD things, like elftoolchain (I have tried to package this but failed, up for grabs if someone want it ) as an alternative to binutils and Clang-compiled linux kernel (https://github.com/lll-project).

* in contrast to the others, this one is not a complete profile so I am going to put the binaries in the following priority order ucb>posix2001>s42>posix>5bin to ensure an as modern environment as possible.

I have also played with the idea of a 9base or headless plan9port replacement. The problem here is that a lot of coreutils-corresponding binaries are not present.
One posibility here is p9base/busybox variant like for heirloom, or to add p9base on top of the ucb profile of heirloom (some packages, most notably md5sum is absent from Heirloom but will be provided by p9base). It would be cool if such a hybrid package could be busybox-independent...

other interesting alternatives are
asmutils (tried to package this one, but failed - up for grabs )
ast (http://www2.research.att.com/sw/download/) (AT&T UNIX userland)
ppt : Perl Power Tools - a *nix re-implementation written in Perl: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48392
Goblin: a *nix/9base re-implementation written in Go: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48413

Last edited by W.F.Cody (2011-04-22 04:19:36)

danthux · 2011-04-21 13:54:00

anyway, remember that to GNU Project doesn't matter where the software come from, ***as it stays free/libre as in freedom*** forever (including derivatives). that is critical to all of us who want to keep beneficing from floss projects like all the tools we/you use and are talking about.

falconindy · 2011-04-21 17:54:41

I've often wanted to port the BSD userland to linux. It's unfortunately not a straight forward job.

Someone, anyone... feel free to beat me to it: http://gitorious.org/freebsd

Last edited by falconindy (2011-04-21 17:55:53)

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-22 07:46:47

falconindy wrote:

I've often wanted to port the BSD userland to linux. It's unfortunately not a straight forward job.
Someone, anyone... feel free to beat me to it: http://gitorious.org/freebsd

It would indeed be cool
As far as I understood it, the sta.li userland was basically 100% openBSD

Perhaps Net/Open BSDs are easier to port to Linux than FreeBSD utilities?

Another thing that would be very cool is Solaris/Illumos userland ported to Linux
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-25 06:40:13

upsidaisium wrote:

9base or the userland from one of the BSDs would be nice.

I have now put up a wiki for

base2busybox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Base2busybox

base2heirloom: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Base2heirloom

base2plan9: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Base2plan9

The things that still need to be done is to try to get them as independent of each other as possible. For the plan9 one, I think we always have to look at it more as an extension of the gnu2heirloom project (a low overlap between plan9port and coreutils), but it would be nice to at least make the gnu2heirloom and gnu2plan9 projects independent of busybox to make it a bit more diverse.

If some missing utilities could be implemented as scripts, that would be very cool... feedback welcome

Superewza · 2011-04-27 01:55:58

upsidaisium wrote:

Ramses de Norre wrote:
Why do you want to do this?
Some people don't necessarily like coreutils (or much of anything from GNU).
9base or the userland from one of the BSDs would be nice.

I don't mind most of the GNU stuff, but a decent alternative to GRUB would be nice...

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-28 12:46:58

Superewza wrote:

I don't mind most of the GNU stuff, but a decent alternative to GRUB would be nice...

What do you mean by "decent"?

LILO: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lilo
extlinux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Extlinux

For bootloaders, I think there is sufficient choice and GRUB is hardly "mandated" in the base system at the moment.

Currently, I am quite surprised how much the system can be pounded at without breaking... I got some ideas to make the busybox, heirloom and plan9 replacement projects more independent of each other. Everything that can not be replaced by an independent alternative utility is to be considered a bug

Personally I believe that the only thing that will not be possible to change is glibc (eglibc does not count since it is just a "spork"). If musl libc manages to reach binary compatibility - perhaps...

Stalafin · 2011-04-28 12:57:13

Why would you actually replace GRUB? Is it so horrible? What do you guys do with your bootloaders that requires some fancy-shmancy feature GRUB doesn't support?

Grinch · 2011-04-28 16:23:05

Gotta ask the same question, what is so bad with GRUB? I'm dual-booting Linux and Haiku on my systems for ages and GRUB has served me well for this purpose (same back when I was dual-booting Linux, Haiku, XP).

Xyne · 2011-04-28 16:34:48

Ramses de Norre wrote:

Why do you want to do this?

Maybe he wants to be able to refer to his system as "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" without fear of Stallman breaking down his door at 3 in the morning to beat him savagely with the head of a dead wildebeest.

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-29 05:58:20

Xyne wrote:

Maybe he wants to be able to refer to his system as "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" without fear of Stallman breaking down his door at 3 in the morning to beat him savagely with the head of a dead wildebeest.

Hehehe. Definitely a quotable post

On the serious note though. I am personally not so concerned about the political stuff (licencing, "Linux" vs "GNU/Linux" etc) and I think we all agree that free software is the best thing ever. I can however appreciate the advantages of permissive licences compared to copyleft ones WRT licence incompatibility issues (which is stupid since most of them in spirit are the same - EPL vs GPL, CCDL vs GPL etc...). I am also not particularly anti-FSF/GNU as such. I much rather like to think in positive terms (pro-diversity) rather than negative terms (anti-GNU, anti-MS, anti whatever).

My personal reasons to start these 3 projects were to offer choice for those that want to try something different or who for one or other reason do not feel comfortable with the default. Most likely each of these tracks will need to grow evolutionarily, adapting to the various problems that arise based on that the system assumes GNU-specific behaviour. How far they go and how extensively they will be able to modify the base system depends on the needs and wishes from their users (it is for example very likely that alternative init scripts etc could be made for the alternative default shells ash, jsh and rc to replace Bash, but lots of other things in the system also assume sh=Bash which then will lead to a need to develop alternatives also for those...). A bash2zsh project could also be interesting...

If I am anti something it would be the monoculture among desktop systems (after some years of distro hopping you notice that they are (basically) all the same... which is a bit sad).

W.F.Cody · 2011-04-30 09:45:16

update: One large step towards having Clang as a viable alternative to GCC was just confirmed to be working (I write from the Clang-compiled kernel at the moment)

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=113533

Arch Linux

#1 2011-04-12 09:37:30

Replacing GNU with other stuff

#2 2011-04-12 10:33:26

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#3 2011-04-12 10:35:40

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#4 2011-04-12 12:11:48

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#5 2011-04-19 10:39:29

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#6 2011-04-20 09:08:14

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#7 2011-04-20 09:29:16

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#8 2011-04-20 09:56:24

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#9 2011-04-21 13:54:00

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#10 2011-04-21 17:54:41

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#11 2011-04-22 07:46:47

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#12 2011-04-25 06:40:13

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#13 2011-04-27 01:55:58

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#14 2011-04-28 12:46:58

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#15 2011-04-28 12:57:13

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#16 2011-04-28 16:23:05

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#17 2011-04-28 16:34:48

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#18 2011-04-29 05:58:20

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

#19 2011-04-30 09:45:16

Re: Replacing GNU with other stuff

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