Annotation of /trunk/mkinitrd-magellan/busybox/TODO

Busybox TODO

Stuff that needs to be done.  This is organized by who plans to get around to
doing it eventually, but that doesn't mean they "own" the item.  If you want to
do one of these bounce an email off the person it's listed under to see if they
have any suggestions how they plan to go about it, and to minimize conflicts
between your work and theirs.  But otherwise, all of these are fair game.

Rob Landley suggested these:
  Add a libbb/platform.c
    Implement fdprintf() for platforms that haven't got one.
    Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc.
    Cleanup bb_asprintf()

  Remove obsolete _() wrapper crud for internationalization we don't do.
  Figure out where we need utf8 support, and add it.

  sh
    The command shell situation is a big mess.  We have three different
    shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't
    work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not
    being reentrant.
    lash is phased out. hush can be configured down to be nearly as small,
    but less buggy :)
  init
    General cleanup (should use ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_SYSLOG and ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_DEBUG).
  Do a SUSv3 audit
    Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at
    "http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and
    figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that
    we might actually care about.

    Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
    exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
  Internationalization
    How much internationalization should we do?

    The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support.  We should do this.
    (Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here.  What else?)

    We also have lots of hardwired english text messages.  Consolidating this
    into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
    also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.

    We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support.  (Not unless we
    can cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to
    concern ourselves with it directly.  Perhaps a few specific things like a
    config option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)

    What level should things happen at?  How much do we care about
    internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
    at it?  (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
    "unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
    --unicode option to loadkeys.  That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
    implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap.  Plus messing with console font
    loading.  Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)

  Individual compilation of applets.
    It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets,
    for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu
    utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big
    executable.

    Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb
    could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less
    got the code for (like zlib).
  buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option
    Busybox 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world
    use, such as developing software or in a live CD.  It needs wider testing.

    Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
    findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
    sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim.  The resulting
    system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source
    code).  This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or
    equivalents.

    It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
    of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
    packages.  Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we can fix.  (It
    would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to replace bash and
    diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)

    One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
      http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
  initramfs
    Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script.  This depends on
    bbsh, mdev, and switch_root.
  mkdep
    Write a mkdep that doesn't segfault if there's a directory it doesn't
    have permission to read, isn't based on manually editing the output of
    lexx and yacc, doesn't make such a mess under include/config, etc.
  Group globals into unions of structures.
    Go through and turn all the global and static variables into structures,
    and have all those structures be in a big union shared between processes,
    so busybox uses less bss.  (This is a big win on nommu machines.)  See
    sed.c and mdev.c for examples.
  Go through bugs.busybox.net and close out all of that somehow.
    This one's open to everybody, but I'll wind up doing it...


Bernhard Reutner-Fischer <busybox@busybox.net> suggests to look at these:
  New debug options:
    -Wlarger-than-127
    Cleanup any big users
    -Wunused-parameter
    Facilitate applet PROTOTYPES to provide means for having applets that
    do a) not take any arguments b) need only one of argc or argv c) need
    both argc and argv. All of these three options should go for the most
    feature complete denominator.
  Collate BUFSIZ IOBUF_SIZE MY_BUF_SIZE PIPE_PROGRESS_SIZE BUFSIZE PIPESIZE
    make bb_common_bufsiz1 configurable, size wise.
    make pipesize configurable, size wise.
    Use bb_common_bufsiz1 throughout applets!

As yet unclaimed:

----
diff
  Make sure we handle empty files properly:
    From the patch man page:

    you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares
    the file to be deleted with an empty file dated the Epoch.  The
    file will be removed unless patch is conforming to POSIX and the
    -E or --remove-empty-files option is not given.
---
patch
  Should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
  shouldn't take up too much space.

  And while we're at it, a new patch filename quoting format is apparently
  coming soon:  http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=112927316408690&w=2
---
man
  It would be nice to have a man command.  Not one that handles troff or
  anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly
  compressed.  This could probably be a script in the extras directory that
  calls cat/zcat/bzcat | less

  (How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
---
ar
  Write support!
---
stty / catv
  stty's visible() function and catv's guts are identical. Merge them into
  an appropriate libbb function.
---
struct suffix_mult
  Several duplicate users of: grep -r "1024\*1024" * -B2 -A1
  Merge to a single size_suffixes[] in libbb.
  Users: head tail od_bloaty hexdump and (partially as it wouldn't hurt) svlogd
---
tail
  ./busybox tail -f foo.c~ TODO
  should not print fmt=header_fmt for subsequent date >> TODO; i.e. only
  fmt+ if another (not the current) file did change

Architectural issues:

bb_close() with fsync()
  We should have a bb_close() in place of normal close, with a CONFIG_ option
  to not just check the return value of close() for an error, but fsync().
  Close can't reliably report anything useful because if write() accepted the
  data then it either went out to the network or it's in cache or a pipe
  buffer.  Either way, there's no guarantee it'll make it to its final
  destination before close() gets called, so there's no guarantee that any
  error will be reported.

  You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(),
  but that can have a big performance impact.  So make it a config option.
---
Unify archivers
  Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure.  The directory
  traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
  be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file",
  "add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on.

  This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar
  write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs or
  mksquashfs someday, if they become relevant.
---
Text buffer support.
  Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read
  a whole file into memory and act on it.  There might be an opportunity
  for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb...
---
Memory Allocation
  We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
  allocation on the stack or the heap.  Unfortunately, we're not using it much.
  We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls
  into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER.
  For a start, see e.g. make EXTRA_CFLAGS=-Wlarger-than-64

  And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be
  optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no
  free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just
  call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so
  we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code.
---
Switch CONFIG_SYMBOLS to ENABLE_SYMBOLS

  In busybox 1.0 and earlier, configuration was done by CONFIG_SYMBOLS
  that were either defined or undefined to indicate whether the symbol was
  selected in the .config file.  They were used with #ifdefs, ala:

    #ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL
      if (other_test) {
        do_code();
      }
    #endif

  In 1.1, we have new ENABLE_SYMBOLS which are always defined (as 0 or 1),
  meaning you can still use them for preprocessor tests by replacing
  "#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL" with "#if ENABLE_SYMBOL".  But more importantly, we
  can use them as a true or false test in normal C code:

    if (ENABLE_SYMBOL && other_test) {
      do_code();
    }

  (Optimizing away if() statements that resolve to a constant value
  is known as "dead code elimination", an optimization so old and simple that
  Turbo Pascal for DOS did it twenty years ago.  Even modern mini-compilers
  like the Tiny C Compiler (tcc) and the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC)
  perform dead code elimination.)

  Right now, busybox.h is #including both "config.h" (defining the
  CONFIG_SYMBOLS) and "bb_config.h" (defining the ENABLE_SYMBOLS).  At some
  point in the future, it would be nice to wean ourselves off of the
  CONFIG versions.  (Among other things, some defective build environments
  leak the Linux kernel's CONFIG_SYMBOLS into the system's standard #include
  files.  We've experienced collisions before.)
---
FEATURE_CLEAN_UP
  This is more an unresolved issue than a to-do item.  More thought is needed.

  Normally we rely on exit() to free memory, close files, and unmap segments
  for us.  This makes most calls to free(), close(), and unmap() optional in
  busybox applets that don't intend to run for very long, and optional stuff
  can be omitted to save size.

  The idea was raised that we could simulate fork/exit with setjmp/longjmp
  for _really_ brainless embedded systems, or speed up the standalone shell
  by not forking.  Doing so would require a reliable FEATURE_CLEAN_UP.
  Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it sounds.

  The problem is, lots of things exit(), sometimes unexpectedly (xmalloc())
  and sometimes reliably (bb_perror_msg_and_die() or show_usage()).  This
  jumps out of the normal flow control and bypasses any cleanup code we
  put at the end of our applets.

  It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and xopen()
  to add their entries to a linked list, which could be traversed and
  freed/closed automatically.  (This would need to be able to free just the
  entries after a checkpoint to be usable for a forkless standalone shell.
  You don't want to free the shell's own resources.)

  Right now, FEATURE_CLEAN_UP is more or less a debugging aid, to make things
  like valgrind happy.  It's also documentation of _what_ we're trusting
  exit() to clean up for us.  But new infrastructure to auto-free stuff would
  render the existing FEATURE_CLEAN_UP code redundant.

  For right now, exit() handles it just fine.


Minor stuff:
  watchdog.c could autodetect the timer duration via:
    if(!ioctl (fd, WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT, &tmo)) timer_duration = 1 + (tmo / 2);
  Unfortunately, that needs linux/watchdog.h and that contains unfiltered
  kernel types on some distros, which breaks the build.
---
  use bb_error_msg where appropriate: See
  egrep "(printf.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2)|[^_]write.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2))"
---
  use bb_perror_msg where appropriate: See
  egrep "[^_]perror"
---
  possible code duplication ingroup() and is_a_group_member()
---
  Move __get_hz() to a better place and (re)use it in route.c, ash.c, msh.c
---
  See grep -r strtod
  Alot of duplication that wants cleanup.
---
  in_ether duplicated in network/{interface,ifconfig}.c
---


Code cleanup:

Replace deprecated functions.

---
vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality
---
1	niro	532	Busybox TODO
2
3			Stuff that needs to be done. This is organized by who plans to get around to
4			doing it eventually, but that doesn't mean they "own" the item. If you want to
5			do one of these bounce an email off the person it's listed under to see if they
6			have any suggestions how they plan to go about it, and to minimize conflicts
7			between your work and theirs. But otherwise, all of these are fair game.
8
9	niro	816	Rob Landley suggested these:
10	niro	532	Add a libbb/platform.c
11			Implement fdprintf() for platforms that haven't got one.
12			Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc.
13			Cleanup bb_asprintf()
14
15			Remove obsolete _() wrapper crud for internationalization we don't do.
16			Figure out where we need utf8 support, and add it.
17
18			sh
19	niro	816	The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three different
20	niro	532	shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't
21			work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not
22	niro	816	being reentrant.
23			lash is phased out. hush can be configured down to be nearly as small,
24			but less buggy :)
25	niro	532	init
26			General cleanup (should use ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_SYSLOG and ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_DEBUG).
27			Do a SUSv3 audit
28			Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at
29			"http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and
30			figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that
31			we might actually care about.
32
33			Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
34			exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
35			Internationalization
36			How much internationalization should we do?
37
38			The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this.
39			(Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?)
40
41			We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this
42			into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
43			also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.
44
45			We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we
46			can cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to
47			concern ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a
48			config option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)
49
50			What level should things happen at? How much do we care about
51			internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
52			at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
53			"unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
54			--unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
55			implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font
56			loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)
57
58			Individual compilation of applets.
59			It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets,
60			for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu
61			utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big
62			executable.
63
64			Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb
65			could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less
66			got the code for (like zlib).
67			buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option
68			Busybox 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world
69			use, such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
70
71			Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
72			findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
73			sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
74			system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source
75			code). This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or
76			equivalents.
77
78			It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
79			of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
80			packages. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we can fix. (It
81			would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to replace bash and
82			diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
83
84			One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
85			http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
86			initramfs
87			Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on
88			bbsh, mdev, and switch_root.
89			mkdep
90			Write a mkdep that doesn't segfault if there's a directory it doesn't
91			have permission to read, isn't based on manually editing the output of
92			lexx and yacc, doesn't make such a mess under include/config, etc.
93			Group globals into unions of structures.
94			Go through and turn all the global and static variables into structures,
95			and have all those structures be in a big union shared between processes,
96			so busybox uses less bss. (This is a big win on nommu machines.) See
97			sed.c and mdev.c for examples.
98			Go through bugs.busybox.net and close out all of that somehow.
99			This one's open to everybody, but I'll wind up doing it...
100
101
102	niro	816	Bernhard Reutner-Fischer <busybox@busybox.net> suggests to look at these:
103	niro	532	New debug options:
104			-Wlarger-than-127
105			Cleanup any big users
106			-Wunused-parameter
107			Facilitate applet PROTOTYPES to provide means for having applets that
108			do a) not take any arguments b) need only one of argc or argv c) need
109			both argc and argv. All of these three options should go for the most
110			feature complete denominator.
111			Collate BUFSIZ IOBUF_SIZE MY_BUF_SIZE PIPE_PROGRESS_SIZE BUFSIZE PIPESIZE
112			make bb_common_bufsiz1 configurable, size wise.
113			make pipesize configurable, size wise.
114			Use bb_common_bufsiz1 throughout applets!
115
116			As yet unclaimed:
117
118			----
119			diff
120			Make sure we handle empty files properly:
121			From the patch man page:
122
123			you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares
124			the file to be deleted with an empty file dated the Epoch. The
125			file will be removed unless patch is conforming to POSIX and the
126			-E or --remove-empty-files option is not given.
127			---
128			patch
129			Should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
130			shouldn't take up too much space.
131
132			And while we're at it, a new patch filename quoting format is apparently
133			coming soon: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=112927316408690&w=2
134			---
135			man
136			It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or
137			anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly
138			compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that
139			calls cat/zcat/bzcat \| less
140
141			(How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
142			---
143			ar
144	niro	816	Write support!
145			---
146	niro	532	stty / catv
147			stty's visible() function and catv's guts are identical. Merge them into
148			an appropriate libbb function.
149	niro	816	---
150			struct suffix_mult
151			Several duplicate users of: grep -r "1024\1024" -B2 -A1
152			Merge to a single size_suffixes[] in libbb.
153			Users: head tail od_bloaty hexdump and (partially as it wouldn't hurt) svlogd
154			---
155			tail
156			./busybox tail -f foo.c~ TODO
157			should not print fmt=header_fmt for subsequent date >> TODO; i.e. only
158			fmt+ if another (not the current) file did change
159	niro	532
160			Architectural issues:
161
162			bb_close() with fsync()
163			We should have a bb_close() in place of normal close, with a CONFIG_ option
164			to not just check the return value of close() for an error, but fsync().
165			Close can't reliably report anything useful because if write() accepted the
166			data then it either went out to the network or it's in cache or a pipe
167			buffer. Either way, there's no guarantee it'll make it to its final
168			destination before close() gets called, so there's no guarantee that any
169			error will be reported.
170
171			You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(),
172			but that can have a big performance impact. So make it a config option.
173			---
174			Unify archivers
175			Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory
176			traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
177			be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file",
178			"add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on.
179
180			This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar
181			write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs or
182			mksquashfs someday, if they become relevant.
183			---
184			Text buffer support.
185			Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read
186			a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity
187			for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb...
188			---
189			Memory Allocation
190			We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
191			allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much.
192			We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls
193			into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER.
194			For a start, see e.g. make EXTRA_CFLAGS=-Wlarger-than-64
195
196			And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be
197			optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no
198			free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just
199			call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so
200			we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code.
201			---
202			Switch CONFIG_SYMBOLS to ENABLE_SYMBOLS
203
204			In busybox 1.0 and earlier, configuration was done by CONFIG_SYMBOLS
205			that were either defined or undefined to indicate whether the symbol was
206			selected in the .config file. They were used with #ifdefs, ala:
207
208			#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL
209			if (other_test) {
210			do_code();
211			}
212			#endif
213
214			In 1.1, we have new ENABLE_SYMBOLS which are always defined (as 0 or 1),
215			meaning you can still use them for preprocessor tests by replacing
216			"#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL" with "#if ENABLE_SYMBOL". But more importantly, we
217			can use them as a true or false test in normal C code:
218
219			if (ENABLE_SYMBOL && other_test) {
220			do_code();
221			}
222
223			(Optimizing away if() statements that resolve to a constant value
224			is known as "dead code elimination", an optimization so old and simple that
225			Turbo Pascal for DOS did it twenty years ago. Even modern mini-compilers
226			like the Tiny C Compiler (tcc) and the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC)
227			perform dead code elimination.)
228
229			Right now, busybox.h is #including both "config.h" (defining the
230			CONFIG_SYMBOLS) and "bb_config.h" (defining the ENABLE_SYMBOLS). At some
231			point in the future, it would be nice to wean ourselves off of the
232			CONFIG versions. (Among other things, some defective build environments
233			leak the Linux kernel's CONFIG_SYMBOLS into the system's standard #include
234			files. We've experienced collisions before.)
235			---
236			FEATURE_CLEAN_UP
237			This is more an unresolved issue than a to-do item. More thought is needed.
238
239			Normally we rely on exit() to free memory, close files, and unmap segments
240			for us. This makes most calls to free(), close(), and unmap() optional in
241			busybox applets that don't intend to run for very long, and optional stuff
242			can be omitted to save size.
243
244			The idea was raised that we could simulate fork/exit with setjmp/longjmp
245			for _really_ brainless embedded systems, or speed up the standalone shell
246			by not forking. Doing so would require a reliable FEATURE_CLEAN_UP.
247			Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it sounds.
248
249			The problem is, lots of things exit(), sometimes unexpectedly (xmalloc())
250			and sometimes reliably (bb_perror_msg_and_die() or show_usage()). This
251			jumps out of the normal flow control and bypasses any cleanup code we
252			put at the end of our applets.
253
254			It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and xopen()
255			to add their entries to a linked list, which could be traversed and
256			freed/closed automatically. (This would need to be able to free just the
257			entries after a checkpoint to be usable for a forkless standalone shell.
258			You don't want to free the shell's own resources.)
259
260			Right now, FEATURE_CLEAN_UP is more or less a debugging aid, to make things
261			like valgrind happy. It's also documentation of _what_ we're trusting
262			exit() to clean up for us. But new infrastructure to auto-free stuff would
263			render the existing FEATURE_CLEAN_UP code redundant.
264
265			For right now, exit() handles it just fine.
266
267
268
269			Minor stuff:
270			watchdog.c could autodetect the timer duration via:
271			if(!ioctl (fd, WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT, &tmo)) timer_duration = 1 + (tmo / 2);
272			Unfortunately, that needs linux/watchdog.h and that contains unfiltered
273			kernel types on some distros, which breaks the build.
274			---
275			use bb_error_msg where appropriate: See
276			egrep "(printf.\([[:space:]](stderr\|2)\|[^_]write.\([[:space:]](stderr\|2))"
277			---
278			use bb_perror_msg where appropriate: See
279			egrep "[^_]perror"
280			---
281			possible code duplication ingroup() and is_a_group_member()
282			---
283			Move __get_hz() to a better place and (re)use it in route.c, ash.c, msh.c
284			---
285	niro	816	See grep -r strtod
286			Alot of duplication that wants cleanup.
287			---
288			in_ether duplicated in network/{interface,ifconfig}.c
289			---
290	niro	532
291
292			Code cleanup:
293
294			Replace deprecated functions.
295
296			---
297			vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality
298			---