Its developers call Busybox the "Swiss Army knife" of embedded Linux, because in one relatively small tool, it implements not just a Unix-style shell, but also about 300 different commands that are normally external programs in their own right. As a result, it's often found inside devices that use Linux in very resource-constrained environments, such as consumer firewall/routers.

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[–] Masterkraft0r@discuss.tchncs.de 26 points 1 month ago (7 children)

"Noooooooo! One tool should do one thing and one thing only! Blasphemy! Heresy! Anthema! Systemd!" crying in unix design philosophy

[–] Magister@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

yeahs systemd I know yada yada :)

But working with embedded stuff, sometimes MCU with like 8MB embedded flash, have a 512k uboot, 1.5MB kernel, you are left with 6MB of flash for the whole application and lib, and busybox is a savior here!

[–] Masterkraft0r@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

it was a joke xD i like busybox (and systemd) i don't particularly subscribe to the unix way, but to each their own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

IMO, "One app/library/etc does one thing only" is a rather ignorant form of wisdom about encapsulation, anyways.

Encapsulation is important regardless of how many disparate tasks a library handles. Doing one thing with one thing is a pretty good rule of thumb to get close to good results, but it is FAR from a golden standard, and serves to drag people away from the finer nuances of encapsulation.

The ONLY time it is a hard and fast rule is at the individual function level. A single function ideally should have one task to accomplish, even if that task has side effects.

I'm sure there are cross-dependency issues on an OS level that makes it a bit wiser to do for widely used system tasks, but to make it an absolute rule smacks of wisdom gone awry. Like not eating shellfish in the bible.

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