[LEDE-DEV] lede integration issues remaining from the detrius of cerowrt

[David Lang]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016, Daniel Curran-Dickinson wrote:

> On Mon, 2016-06-13 at 11:17 +0200, Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> no need to overreact :)  I think parts of the topics are about the
>
> Hope you're referring to Pinney and not me!  I was concerned because
> Dave Taht's email and David Lang's post) seemed to me to imply changing the
> defaults to suit bigger iron as the default rather than simply making
> it a supported option.

I think you misunderstood our comments and concerns. We want the bigger hardware 
to be a supported option, and don't like the response that this initially got of 
"that's something only needed for bigger hardware, we shouldn't have it as an 
option in LEDE"

Both of us play with very small hardware as well, we don't want to close out the 
low end devices.

> I also think that talking about a 5-10 plan as
> the basis if making decision of what to include by default in *current* builds
> is rather foolish thinking.  Yes planning for the future is important but to
> it reminds of a quote from when I was religious: "Don't be so heavenly-minded
> you're no earthly good".  Basically here and now needs not to be forgotten in
> dreams of future wonders.

Agreed, but at the same time you shouldn't ignore support for the larger 
hardware.

Remember, this thread started with the request to support hard drives >2TB and 
the reaction was "we don't need that routers only have a few tens of KB of 
flash" (even though it turned out that the support has already been included)

<agreement on the need to support old/small hardware>
>
> To a certain extent though, I question the need for something as restricted as OpenWrt
> for the new bigger devices anyway; there are elements like netifd that would be good to
> see continue, but I'm not sure that most of OpenWrt really makes as much sense when you're
> not needing to squeeze maximum use out of very erase block, and that therefore, while it
> may be a smaller market/mindshare, that focussing on the the true embedded type scenario,
> seems to be more of what LEDE's niche is.

LEDE/OpenWRT is a good fit for any device that operates on raw flash instead of 
a hard drive or ssd with wear leveling. Once you have storage that you don't 
worry about wearing out and is large enough to hold a normal Linux Distro, it 
makes sense to move to such a distro and update packages individually.

But when you have a limited amount of boot/OS storage that does not have wear 
leveling in place, then the OpenWRT/LEDE approach of a complete filesystem image 
that gets updated as a whole still makes sense.

Even when we have a few Gb of flash storage available, we will still want to use 
compressed, read-only filesystems for the main OS packages.

David Lang