[Documentation] Differences to busybox?

[rubyFeedback]

I just discovered toybox. Right now I am not sure what it is.

Reading it it sounds a bit like busybox?

Could a paragraph be added to the main README, or linked in, explaining differences and
similarities? Perhaps also the history of toybox?

Right now I don't really know what toybox is, even after reading the main README and
link on linux-reddit.

PS: Also the homepage is a bit hard to read. Could it be considered to add a LITTLE bit
of CSS and better structure to it overall? Right now it reads a bit as if it is 1996.

[landley]

They are similar. I created/maintain toybox, and I used to maintain busybox before that. I started over for several reasons, one of which is I thought I could do a better job with a different infrastructure design.

The https://landley.net/toybox page has "what is toybox", "why is toybox", and "what context was toybox created in" sections, and that third one does talk a bit about the difference between busybox and toybox and the history behind the project.

That page also links to video of a talk I gave called "Toybox vs Busybox", about the differences between the two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g

I'm scheduled to give a talk on the mkroot compoment of toybox this weekend at Texas LinuxFest in Austin: https://2024.texaslinuxfest.org/talks/mkroot-tiny-linux-system-builder/ (no idea when they might post video of that).

I'm sorry your browser has trouble rendering plain HTML legibly. I'm typing a text response without even paragraph tags here, and github is presumably somehow rendering it legibly for you, without me having to add any additional information.

[landley]

I also did a couple of experimental tutorial videos a while back (the "youtube" link in the nav bar on the left), if people find them helpful I could do more:

https://www.youtube.com/@roblandley1154/videos

There's also a quickstart page in the same nav bar:

https://landley.net/toybox/quick.html

But that won't help if your browser can't legibly render text pages without css. (Maybe ctrl-plus to increase the font size? What is that on mac, command-plus?)

[hatonthecat]

I think the readability issue for some is that the margins are not configured, but the text does a wordwrap, so resizing the window to 1/2 or 1/3rd of the screen automatically makes it narrower and easier to read. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the text into a word doc and make two columns (attachment)
Toybox.pdf
Toybox.odt

[landley]

This question recently came up again and I did a quick pass at the command level at http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2025-January/030639.html The problem with having a FAQ entry or similar on it is any thorough static analysis gets stale. Even the roadmap.html information is a bit stale, I mostly just glance through that each release and _remove_ stuff that's now been implemented (or has otherwise become no longer relevant). Busybox is a moving target, I would need to review each new _busybox_ release to stay up to date on any sort of thorough comparison. I'm open to suggestions, but I'm probably going to close this issue at some point because I don't have a useful suggestion for what to DO about it? My long-term goal is to get toybox building linux from scratch and then AOSP (the way https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html made busybox build linux from scratch, which was picked up and maintained by things like alpine linux afterwards). What busybox/alpine specifically does isn't directly relevant to that, except as another data point like what debian does or what macos homebrew does. LFS and AOSP are much more _interesting_ moving targets...