An excerpt from freenode IRC channel #devuan (Jaromil being the founder of https://www.devuan.org basically)

[2016-05-31 Tue 20:37:51] <jaromil> DocScrutinizer05: we were talking about you just now me and hellekin
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:38:25] <jaromil> and we think we have great potential and should put some things straight with the neo900 community
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:38:28] <jaromil> so we can help each other
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:38:39] <jaromil> lets say you can count on all the CI infrastructure
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:38:44] <DocScrutinizer05> :-)
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:38:48] <jaromil> and we spin the images on it
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:39:02] <DocScrutinizer05> that sounds AWESOME
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:39:10] <jaromil> so you can concentrate on the coding
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:39:37] <DocScrutinizer05> well, coding is ... Pali and freemangordon ;-)
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:39:40] <jaromil> this would be a good goal and win win, doesn't costs much right now
[2016-05-31 Tue 20:39:48] <DocScrutinizer05> indeed


This means that Maemo and particularly the FPTF "fork" have a cooperative and helpful compatible upstream again.

(on an irrelevant sidenote: Hellekin already created a new git with bugtracker and all for internal Neo900 maintenance et al there, and I hope we'll see a [public] FPTF branch shortly too)

cheers
jOERG

Are there any plans to upgrade BusyBox from 1.10.2 to, say, 1.27.2? Or will it break too many things? Or would the latest BusyBox be too heavy to run on Nokia N900? Apologies if it was already discussed somewhere.

https://busybox.net/

Thank you. Best wishes.
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Per aspera ad astra...

Why use busybox at all? Why not use the regular, full-strength gnu utilities?

BusyBox was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources.

While Neo900 may have more resources (CPU, RAM) than N900, it still has a limited battery. Besides, the-latest-upgraded-maemo would ideally be able to run on N900, too.

At the same time, I was wondering about https://i.imgur.com/iYSOTfL.png : where does BusyBox 1.23.1 come from?.. Does it work well with everything?

Thank you. Best wishes.
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Per aspera ad astra...

I understand this is busybox's purpose; I just don't think the N900 has such limited resources that stripped-down utilities are a good idea. I run Easy Debian on my N900, with standard gnu utilities, and the performance is just fine. If I were running things (a frightening idea) I'd have maemo for the neo900 built with the standard utilities installed, and provide instructions for users who prefer to get that extra little bit of batterylife they could have by substituting busybox. Standard gnu/linux should be the default, where possible.

@Ken-Young:
While the N900 certainly has more than enough power to run bash (or any other shell), I think it's still a good idea to keep the default shell at a bare minimum, which means busybox.
Not everybody likes bash best. Some people prefer zsh, others like ksh and I even know people who voluntarily use csh (although I doubt their state of mind ).
One reason to not like bash is because it's GNU and if you're not careful, using it makes you create GNUisms in your code that won't be portable in terms of POSIX compliance.

As long as everybody is free to install his favourite shell I see no harm in shipping busybox as a default.
The reason why I installed bash in my ED images is because I do like bash and I don't mind the GNUisms. You should see this rather as a deviation from my usual approach of providing a minimal sane package base than as part of that minimalism (the same is true for vim btw.).