[LEDE-DEV] Recently added feature in UCI - mandatory anonymous sections

[Antonio Paunovic]

Hello everyone,

recently there was a change in default UCI behaviour which you can see here:

http://git.openwrt.org/?p=project/uci.git;a=commit;h=df72af474075159ab79ed190d2109eb2d86709bf

While change in implementation is minor, this means that there won't be
anonymous sections anymore. Need may arise to update UCI configurations remotely
and anonymous sections are inconvenient for this use case. Being anonymous they
can't be addressed in straightforward manner.

By default, sections would be named automatically and currently there is no way
to change it. Some concerns were raised regarding how UCI is used and why this
feature needs to be discussed. There is a tendency to open configuration files
and manually copy-paste sections with similar purposes. Those sections are
usually anonymous because name would be superfluous. And sometimes there is even
an option 'name' (or similar) in anonymous sections.

Those are current benefits and concerns but there may be others in the wild.
We'd like to hear about experience from the community and suggestions in order
to resolve challenges above. Anybody has any thoughts on the subject?

Kind regards,
Antonio