Re: --enable-tiny option

[Paul Eggert]

Robert Millan <address@hidden> writes:

> busybox is one of the most unportable programs I ever seen.

It's pretty squished, yes.

> I don't think the #if directives would add much clutter. I don't
> know coreutils sources myself, but I believe that most of the code
> in them are GNU extensions.

Yes, probably.  But I'm afraid that the extensions normally won't be
big blocks of code; they'll be scattered throughout the code.  Lots of
ifdefs will give the coreutils maintainer fits.

> (could you give a more accurate estimation on that?)

It's nontrivial to estimate, I'm afraid.

> If my assumption is correct, the #if directive addition would mostly look 
> like:
> 
> #ifndef TINY
> [ bulk of code for extra features ]
> #endif
> [ code for common code to comply with POSIX ]

I suggest defining TINY (or better perhaps its antonym, EXTRAS) as
boolean constants, so that you can write this:

   if (EXTRAS)
     code_for_extra_features ();

as this will be easier to read than ifdefs.  You can also use "#if
EXTRAS" if that's necessary, but typically "if (EXTRAS)" nests nicer
and has better compile-time checking.

My suggestion is to pick one nontrivial program ("cat", say) and try
to do just that one, to see if the coreutils maintainer has a heart
attack with the result.