Am 01.07.2010 00:40, schrieb Victor Lowther:
I have no problem having GNU-specific features in there, as we can rely on GNU find (or GNU whatever) being present. The only exception is initramfs - however, no shell script is used in both the system and initramfs
That is one reason I helped write and use dracut (the new initramfs generation framework that Fedora 12 and 13 use, and that RHEL6 will use) -- instead of using busybox/klobc/whatever, it trades a slightly larger initramfs for the convienence of using exactly the same binaries the installed system uses for everything. I will happily trade a few hundred K larger initramfs for not having to maintain another toolchain and userspace just for the initramfs.
Well, it's basically what I did in mkinitcpio 0.6. I dumped klibc and all the packages that used it in favor of pure glibc binaries. However, I still use busybox instead of util-linux-ng and coreutils: It is much more convenient to just run "busybox --install -s" and have a fully functional environment than having to collect all the basic tools and make sure they are installed. The maintenance effort for busybox is almost nonexistent, and it offers many tools that you wouldn't install into initramfs otherwise. I am convinced that this is the best of both worlds, I get a feature-rich and very very small initramfs environment this way. Anyway, this is OT in this thread and we probably shouldn't pollute it with this discussion.