Finally it has been pushed to extras-devel: busybox-power 1.18.5power3. This release’s features are all related to shell history in some kind of way. The release fixes three bugs in total:
- Bug 4174 – (int-107770) shell history file is overwritten after every command
- Bug 4175 – History cross-contamination between concurrently running shells
- Bug 5317 – (int-143013) Shell does not save command history / Busybox doesn’t handle SIGHUP properly
Bug #4174 and #4175 are actually related. Upstream BusyBox doesn’t have bug #4175, but it did suffer from it in the 1.10.x series. For some reason, bug #4175 was falsely (?) marked as resolved, even though history cross-contamination is in fact still present in Fremantle’s stock BusyBox. Try opening two terminals with Maemo’s stock BusyBox and type some commands; only the history from the last closed terminal will be saved.
Since we forward-ported the patch that resolved bug #4174, which was based on the old BusyBox series, for busybox-power we actually reintroduced bug #4175 in upstream BusyBox. Both bugs are now resolved by creating a brand new patch to fix bug #4174 while leaving upstream’s concurrent shell history handling completely intact.
Lastly, I was pointed to bug #5317 by Qole in busybox-power’s TMO thread. This was a rather easy fix, especially since I could 1:1 use the fix from Diablo’s CSSU for this bug! Shell history will now be written out too when the user closes X-term by GUI, instead of only when the user exists with the “exit” command in X-term itself.
I’m personally very excited with this new release. We finally have a more proper, or in other words: reliable, shell history handling in Maemo. Don’t forget to follow busybox-power’s thread at TMO (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=72801) and subject the new release to some serious testing when it lands in extras-testing tomorrow!
Enjoy the new release!
