Release Notes

busybox-w32 version FRP-4882-g6e0a6b7e5 was released on 2023-02-15. It is the current release. For other release notes see:

• the release before this one
• index of all release notes

make applet

The experimental make applet has been updated to match upstream version 1.4.1 (release notes).

• Compliance with the current POSIX standard has been improved.
• Pragmas allow some of the requirements of the standard to be relaxed when running in POSIX mode. They also allow the user to control which version of the standard is enforced at runtime. By default this is the current (2017) version. To switch to the forthcoming ("202X") version use command line flags:

     make --posix -x posix_202x ...
  

  or add the following at the start of the makefile:

     .POSIX:
     .PRAGMA: posix_202x
  

• The applet has been given the alias pdpmake. This makes it possible to disable make at build time while retaining access to the applet under its alternative name.

  make can also be disabled at runtime with this setting in the shell:

     export BB_OVERRIDE_APPLETS="make"
  

File metadata

The never-ending quest to make file ownership and permissions seem more like Unix continues.

• A regression in the FRP-4264-gc79f13025 release resulted in incorrect write permissions being reported for directories. This has been fixed. (GitHub issue #280)
• Using only file ownership information to determine write permissions proved insufficient. In some cases it's also necessary to check if access is allowed by an access control list (ACL). A particular case in point is the user's home directory. On Windows it belongs to a system user, with the actual owner granted permission via an ACL. (GitHub issue #280)
• Providing an accurate value of the number of links to a directory requires a potentially time-consuming count of its subdirectories. Avoid doing this unless the information is actually needed.
• Determining if a file is executable could result in its access time being updated. This is no longer the case. Recent versions of Windows don't update access times by default so this only makes a difference if the user has chosen to enable this feature.

Line terminators

Unix and Microsoft Windows use different line terminators: line feed (LF) in Unix and carriage return plus line feed (CRLF) in Windows. Upstream BusyBox mostly targets Linux so it assumes the Unix convention. busybox-w32 targets Windows so it has to allow for native files and utilities using CRLF line terminators. This requires changes to the code and can be problematic.

Some recent developments in this area:

• Normally the diff applet reads input in text mode, where CRLFs are converted to LFs. It now has a --binary option to disable this conversion. This is similar to the behaviour of GNU diff. sed in busybox-w32 already had such an option.
• vi now has a -b command line option and binary (abbreviation: bin) option. These force the use of binary mode for input and output. vim has a similar feature.
• The fileformat (abbreviation: ff) option in vi is no longer read-only. This allows the user to override the format used when the current editing buffer is written to a file. The binary option takes precedence, though.
• In a number of places the code incorrectly removed CRs from input even though they weren't part of a CRLF line ending. These cases have been fixed.

Bug fixes and enhancements

• When reporting errors getopt respects the name provided by the -n option. (GitHub issue #274)
• Reading input files has been speeded up in a number of cases. The exact speed-up depends on the applet: tests show sort about twice as fast, grep four or five times faster. (GitHub issue #278)
• Random numbers generated by the rand() function in awk were found to be correlated between runs separated by a small time interval. Some improvements have been made which are probably sufficient for less-demanding requirements. As ever, anyone making serious use of random numbers should make their own arrangements. (GitHub issue #279)
• The (non-default) vi line editing mode in the shell could result in unexpected termination of the shell when certain commands were invoked in certain circumstances. (GitHub issue #283)
• The shell in busybox-w32 sets the HOME variable, as it's commonly used by other applets to find the user's home directory. If these other applets are run outside the context of the shell HOME may not be set. Provide a default value so that, for example, vi is able to find its ~/.exrc file.

Changes imported from upstream

busybox-w32 has been synchronised with upstream BusyBox.

Most changes this time don't affect busybox-w32. One that might be useful to somebody is that pkill -e displays the name and PID of the process being killed.