[LEDE-DEV] OpenWRT tree vs LEDE tree

[Jo-Philipp Wich]

Dear Bjørn,

> But I believe you should realize that for an outsider, the "we are 
> working on a solution" does not sound too good.  It is unclear who
> "we" are, but it is very clear that it excludes the reader.  This is 
> defintitely not an invitation to participate.  And the completely 
> contentless "a solution" just emphasize that. Not exactly opening up
> for public discussion.

Felix reached out to the OpenWrt on 15th and asked whether there's any
interest in having a constructive IRC debate to discuss the future of
both projects and Hauke subsequently did set up a vote in order to find
a suitable time frame.

The vote is ongoing but atm it looks like it will become Wednesday, May
25th at 18:00 GMT.

> And it has been more than a few days now... Or maybe I'm not patient 
> enough.

Maybe, maybe not. Personally I expect the discussion process to last for
a few weeks to come.

> Yes, I understand perfectly well that resources are scarce, and that
> I have no right to point to these issues while not actually
> contributing myself.

You have every right to point out issues and personally I am grateful
for constructive input, just try to be clear and explicit when raising
concerns.

> But all the problems you listed with the OpenWrt project were similar
> - lack of resources. Forking to solve that problem will not help.

It already helped to achieve a few things envisioned, some of them
would have been possible within OpenWrt, some not.

- Decisions and meetings made wrt. the project got recorded and
  published
- Build servers got sponsored and integrated into Builbot
- Download server mirrors got sponsored and are automatically synced now
- We managed to figure out a working mode where people can easily
  contribute via both Github and mailing list patches while we can
  still keep a somewhat linear repository history
- Web site resources are put into Git so people can contribute to them
- Multiple active persons being able to deal with server matters
- Some work has been started to produce and improve documentation
- Felix and John started tackling image build problems complicating
  releases in the past
- I published our buildbot setup so people can reproduce the things
  being done to create binaries
- I decoupled feeds from target builds in order to enable us doing
  binary package updates in the future (think security issues)

> Which is why I try to give you a hard time now.  Don't know if I have
> enough "oomph" to actually do that.  If you don't see that LEDE is 
> OpenWrt with less developers, then someone must point that out to
> you.

As you pointed out yourself, it is the result that matters and so far
fewer developers produced more changes in less time compared to OpenWrt.

> Yes, this is extremely unfair.  Just like the I'm sure some
> developers saw the original LEDE announcement.  Good intentions are
> not enough. It's the result that matters.

I certainly agree but we should avoid applying double standards here, I
doubt that people expected any "results that matter" within a time frame
of only two weeks from OpenWrt.

That being said I welcome your effort in scrutinizing the project, this
will certainly help us not loosing focus in the future.

~ Jo