well, that was an interesting alpine TSC meeting.
the gist of it is that we have concluded that busybox must go, and have committed to beginning to decouple busybox from the distribution, so that it may become an optional component.
this decoupling will begin with two initiatives for 3.17:
- decoupling the init system, based on Laurent Bercot's TSC proposal with modifications
- replacing /bin/sh (at the moment, FreeBSD /bin/sh is the likely contender)
@ariadne TIL there is an init system, I thought alpine was just for containers
@tthbaltazar thanks Docker
@ariadne Not sure how FreeBSD /bin/sh compares to busybox, and how much it matters for alpine init, but in my brief testing forever ago, FreeBSD's /bin/sh was weirdly slow. So much so, that it became noticeable with some configuration management scripts a few companies ago.
@ar both are almquist shells, so i expect performance to be roughly equivalent
update:
No, I can't find a portable version of FreeBSD sh, but maybe I didn't look hard enough.
After fighting with the preprocessor and linker for a couple of hours, I finally compiled the shell, which promptly segfaults for some reason I don't understand.
if there is further time in this cycle, I might propose minimizing the applet set included with busybox by default, too, but we will see.