busybox replacement idea

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

This is related to the "individual software releases for third parties" 
thread.

As a brief description, BusyBox provides several stripped-down Unix and 
Linux tools in a single executable. I have used a few BusyBox systems 
and common (coreutils or other standard "Linux") command line options 
may not work and the behaviour is often different or unuseful. It has 
reduced functionality. But I don't think the goal is to be complete or 
user friendly but to save space. They do have a goal to be standards 
compliant though. The tarball includes configuration and build rules and 
then source from various projects. Depending on the configuration, there 
may be up to 310 commands all contained in one binary.

NetBSD already has a similar feature: /rescue/foo. This crunchgen 
solution has around 150 commands.

$ /rescue/ls -l /rescue/init
-r-xr-xr-x  152 root  wheel  5113176 Feb  8  2009 /rescue/init
$ size /rescue/ls 
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
4949565  159872 2697592 7807029  772035 /rescue/ls
$ file /rescue/ls
/rescue/ls: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), 
statically linked, for NetBSD 5.0, stripped

(Ignore the name; all the commands are linked as a single binary.)

We should be able to just copy the existing simple and short src/rescue/ 
infrastructure to create the more complete replacement. Then we should 
allow building this for a non-NetBSD target system. Any suggestions or 
examples on how to build rescue for a non-NetBSD target system?

We may not be as small, but three benefits may be 1) user friendly 
commands; 2) nice license for proprietary use (There have been 
license violations reported for busybox); and 3) nice promotion of 
NetBSD.

Any thoughts on this?