The buildtime looks good, but according to the busybox website version 1.22.1 is an antique version from Jan 2014, whereas the most recent version is 1.28.3.
My question: is it Fairphone’s job to update to a more recent version of busybox?
Also, can anybody explain to me, why many commands use toybox instead of busybox? Is there a way I can change this?
For example
$ which ls # ls links to /system/bin/toybox
/system/bin/ls
$ ls -S # some features are not available
ls: Unknown option '-S'. Aborting.
$ /system/xbin/ls -S # busybox' ls sorts by size
...
I have seen this claim elsewhere, but I don’t think it’s true. I downloaded the image from the Fairphone website, unpacked everything and found the busybox binary under /system/xbin. That’s exactly where it is on my FP system.
Not sure that it will match your needs (and you probably know this…), but you can install busybox from f-droid. Is this a way to change things the way you want?
Thank you for your suggestion. I am aware that I can install busybox myself. But I think most people don’t know this. My question was specifically, if people think, that Fairphone should do something about it. I also hoped for an explanation, why the system is currently set up in the strange way it is (toybox in /system/bin/ and busybox in /system/xbin/).
For that kind of things, Fairphone relies on the AOSP code (via CodeAurora). It is mainly Google —developer of Android— the one who makes that kind of integrity decisions. Some system utilities may be old, but if they are not vulnerable and they are stable, why would anyone change them?