New busybox-w32 version

[stianhoiland]

A new version of busybox-w32 released some days ago (2026-05-07). Its version number is FRP-6075-g169694ebd. I have been waiting for a new version for a long time now and I'm excited to get this into w64devkit. I'll finally be updating from 2.1.0 when this drops in w64devkit :)

[skeeto]

I added it within a few hours of its release: b79f08a and 7523c67. The last w64devkit release was only a week ago, and I want to spend time dogfooding the busybox-w32 changes anyway, so it won't be in a release for awhile (June?). If you can't build it yourself, you can pluck a build from the latest Actions pipeline. The only difference from a release is that it's not code-signed.

[stianhoiland]

busybox-w32 gained crond and crontab applets, but I have decided to
disable them.

Hey! I might want those! You write the reasons for the other applets not included. What was your reason for this?

[skeeto]

This is a development kit, and the focus is development tools, not to be a whole system. Particularly not daemons (crond). Non-interactive tools that transform data are fine (join). The old httpd app breaks this rule, and I've considered removing it, but it's been useful in a pinch often enough that I've kept it.

[Peter0x44]

Cron is way more useful than httpd, imo. I'd probably manage to find a use for it eventually.

[MarcroSoft]

I don't know how cron works here, but if the kit can build things automatically when it is open I agree with @stianhoiland and @Peter0x44

[skeeto]

Hmm, so I tried it in 49e844b but crond doesn't work:

$ crond
crond: syslog isn't supported on Windows

[skeeto]

Ah, the default doesn't work, requires logging to a file:

$ mkdir -p "$W64DEVKIT_HOME/var/log"
$ crond -L "$W64DEVKIT_HOME/var/log/cron"

Seems like this could be better...

Edit: Actually, that's still not enough.

$ mkdir -p "$W64DEVKIT_HOME/var/spool/cron/crontabs"
$ crond -L "$W64DEVKIT_HOME/var/log/cron" -C "$W64DEVKIT_HOME/var/spool/cron/crontabs"
$ crontab -c "$W64DEVKIT_HOME/var/spool/cron/crontabs" -e

I'm not happy with any of these defaults.

[Peter0x44]

Cron is nice for scheduling jobs you might want agents to do. After all, that's pretty much what openclaw is.

[rmyorston]

@skeeto I'd like to add support for exe-relative crond configuration directories at some point. I just haven't got there yet.

[skeeto]

Thanks, @rmyorston, that's good to know!