Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line

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> forgo any kind of documentation: what options are supported by specific commands, what behaviours they exhibit

Quite clearly, it doesn't carry a meaning of: "hey, every user now has to become a proficient reader of whatever languages this software is written in."

Hating the idea of intellectual property doesn't make it go away. Neither do permissive licenses. Which is why your "ceteris paribus" statement is effectively worthless.

> And the "companies will be forced to give back to the project" argument never made sense to me.

Care to explain where you think it falls apart?

So far, it simply seems like you're fed up with the system and would rather rage in denial than try to improve the system or use it to your advantage. That may give you some degree of satisfaction, but it's silly for you to assert that everyone benefits from the same. And if you really just want to stop caring about copyright, I don't see why you'd bother advocating for MIT or BSD over GPL instead of just turning to casual piracy like most people who can't be bothered to respect software copyright.

Unless that person is in receipt of a binary, in which case they are SOL.

The GPL license is the only license which protects end-user rights to see and modify source code of the software they use.

The purpose of a copyleft license is to encourage derivatives that don't come with such restrictions.

Copyleft therefore helps reach a local maximum of freedom for everyone as a function of restrictions on redistribution.

any business that wants to use gpl software has a problem.

It's not that gpl is bad either, or that it can't be used for commercial purposes, it's simply that the traditional business model doesn't include giving anything to anyone else.

So like I said, google "mit vs gpl" to get countless articles and discussions explaining all about that. That is the answer to "what's the problem with gpl here?"

This project is 0bsd not mit but mit will yield more hits, and is the same fundamental issue.

Unfortunately many companies seem to think that because they downloaded the software for free from the internet, they don't need to care about what the license text says. And if they disregard what some random person on the internet whines about them not following some license, a lawsuit seems perfectly in order.

Now one could argue, as Landley seems to be doing, that a permissive license is more attractive to corporations as there is less risk that some mistake somewhere along the way gets them sued. Then one can of course counter that argument by asking whether such users are beneficial to open source in the longer term, or is the open source community just a bunch of suckers doing free work for corporations without getting anything in return.

While toybox does not have my dc, I don't know what you mean by toybox not having a bc. It does, and it is based on mine. It's not in the community directory, it's in the pending directory (bc.c), which just means it's not enabled by default. You can enable it if you wish. Rob himself does because it's what allows toybox to have all of the utilities necessary for building Linux. (Yes, Linux requires bc to build.)

Edit: I've corrected my parent comment because you are right that toybox does not have my dc. But it does still have my bc.

I think it's a false goal if it comes before correctness. Auditability is great, but it's kinda useless to say, "Yep, I know your code is wrong."

Unfortunately, it seems to be Rob's number one goal over even correctness. (Busybox is even worse about binary size.) And with the way Rob asked for me to change things, it actually made things less readable, which is an important part of auditability. So he and I have a fundamental disagreement over it.

Yes, you should; `bc` includes trigonometric functions even in POSIX accessible by the `-l` flag.

However, I'm not sure why you would; if you know you have a `bc` implementation other than a strict POSIX `bc`, I would just use that, even in a POSIX shell script.

POSIX is extremely limited; it does not even have `else` for `if` statements! It also does not allow you to use comparison operators outside an `if` statement or loop header. It does not have `continue`.

On the other hand, my `bc` is known to work in just about every POSIX system, and there are ports for it in OpenBSD and NetBSD. It is also the system `bc` in FreeBSD for FreeBSD 13. It also builds on Linux for either glibc or musl, and there are packages for it in Arch AUR, Gentoo, and other smaller distros. And it's easy to build from source with zero dependencies.

In short, if you're going to write a shell script to do math, I'd personally find it more appealing to actually check for and install my `bc` than to use strict POSIX.

> Is there a "translator" that reads `GNU bc` or your `bc` for example, and converts it into POSIX-compliant bc? (meaning converting the symbols to one letter in a way that does not produce conflict, declaring all used variables in a function in the first line (auto), etc)

For the record, my `bc` and GNU `bc` still require the auto list. That's part of the standard, so we cannot really get away from it.

But as for the existence of a translator, no, there is not a translator. I could probably write one, and putting it in my `bc` would be easiest since my `bc` already has a parser.

However, I do not think that would be a good use of time; trying to translate some features, especially `continue` would be tough. `continue` would be tough because I would have to translate the loop into two loops and when exiting the loop, differentiate the case between exiting for a `continue` and an actual exit, and if on `continue` let the outer loop loop.

Also, some features just could not translate, I'm afraid. My `bc` has a full PRNG, which can generate numbers of arbitrary size and precision. There just would not be a way of translating that feature.

And putting the translator in my `bc` would sort of be useless; if you installed it for the translator, why not just use it?

If this message sounds annoyed, it's because I'm annoyed at POSIX, not you. The fact that they have not even standardized `else` really gets my goat; all implementations, besides the Plan 9 one, have `else`, even one that translates for `dc`. There's no excuse for not having it. And they also seem to limit it on purpose, with not allowing comparison operators outside of `if` and loops. (Oh, and you can only use ONE operator per `if` and loop!) Grr...

tl;dr: Yes, use `bc` for trigonometry in shell scripts, but use a full-featured `bc` if at all possible.