[LEDE-DEV] Stability & release plans

[yanosz]

Hello,


Am 10/24/2016 um 06:50 PM schrieb Jo-Philipp Wich:
> Hi yanosz,
> 
> Alberto kindly pointed out that your inquiry didn't receive any response
> so far, so please excuse the lack of communication.

Thanks for your time and effort here - I really appreciate your
feedback. I'd like to provide a few thoughts on this. May it helps,
maybe it doesn't.

1. I'm unhappy with the state of OpenWRT at the moment. I see some
trouble in building and releasing. The current code base has some bugs.
I'ven't seen a fix for "mad cow" yet. For me it is hard to estimate
whether OpenWRT is able to include, build and release critical patches
over the next months in a timely fashion.

2. When looking at lede I'm somewhat missing the release engineering
part. This has nothing to do with infrastructure or build setups or even
coding. When looking at Debian they have a release team taking care of
freezing, planning and releases. - or take Theo de Raadt's job in
OpenBSD for instance.

IMHO From a release engineering point of view it's good to do release if
a software is reasonable better then the one released before.
>From a developer's point of view, it's good to release, if he or she
feels confident with his or her work and all annoying bugs are fixed.

IMHO planning a lede release is worth the effort if it's reasonable
better then the last OpenWRT-Release, no matter what bugs, refactorings
or infrastructure issue are outstanding, still. Having a fixed schedule
(every 6/8/12 months) or so will ease discussion on when to release and
what features to include, since freeze-dates, commit-handling etc. are
more or less fixed.

IMHO it is an interesting idea to announce a release in six months or so
(one year after its founding :-) ), make a plan on freezing / branching
/ etc. and stick to fixed schedule (every n months)

I offered help on this to nbd on 2012's (2013 .. maybe) Wireless
Community Week and my offer is still stands. Not being a OpenWRT / lede
veteran  I'm not interesting in taking the lead here. I'm not interested
in bossing somebody around of becoming a ego-manic project lead ..,.
Back in 2012, there was hardly any interest in this kind of help, but
I'm not sure, if the lede split has changed anything here.

3. I think, gluon is doing an good job here. They're taking the OpenWRT
/ lede codebase and release it in a concise way. Unfortunately - due to
releasing no binary artifacts - they address power-users instead of
novices. And gluon - in its current form - can hardly be used to just
flash and use a SOHO router for whatever is interesting.

I don't know much about tcatm's plans for gluon. I don't know, if binary
releases are on its map or if synchronizing gluon and lede releases is a
good idea. But ... IMHO it's worth thinking about this.

That's it.
I'll be at the 33c3 by the end of the year, so if you're interested
discussing this in person, I'm available ;-).

Greetz, yanosz

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