# abinit

This code tree represents an approximation of the natural evolution of what might have been the newly nascent UNIX computing environment. To this aim, the development is hosted in a specifically constructed and minimally equipped environment with a basic init process and shell (/bin/sh /sbin/init) along with an unspecified ANSI-C conformant libc and compiler (cc). A vi clone is used for text entry and POSIX.1.2008 compatible system interfaces are assumed.

What the code is NOT, however, is a rewrite of a more or less conformant/inclusive UNIX userland (a-la-busybox) although many of its components can and are used as such within the primordial environment described above.


The rest of this document is a higher-level record of the progression of development of such system and is distinct in scope from the source-control changelog. The entries come in chronological order of what was either immediately needed for normal operation of the computing environment and/or further development, or a just concretized concept for a new and useful utility to be implemented later on.

Legend:
*** Essential/Dependency
+++ Helpful/Enabler
--- Aesthetic and User eXperience
0-9 Status/Progress (0:Concept, 1-8: WIP, 9:Feature-complete)

* First came 'mkdir' [9], 'rmdir' [9] as well as 'unlink' [9].
* 'cat' [9].
+ Utility of 'sed' [0] became abvious as the need to substitute ill-chosen identifier names
  in source files became impractical to do manually... the choice to include a vi clone
  as a code editor demoted sed to a status of '+++'.
- 'which' [9]
* The equivalent of what could be performed with a 'cat SRC>DEST && unlink SRC' is now
  'mv' [9] - bonus for painless moves of entires directory trees.
* 'cp' [1] will be needed next.
+ 'rm' [5]
- 'id' [8], 'uname' [9].
- 'ls' [6]
+ 'mktemp' [9], 'env' [9] : these are shell scripting enablers
* 'chmod' [1] : along with cp, are needed for user home directory system administration
* 'sort' [4]
+ 'sed'++! [0]
+ 'uniq' [7]
+ 'tail' [7]