[LEDE-DEV] how to make sysupgrade not drop user-installed packages

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

moin,

i'm wondering what could be done about the nuisance that after a
sysupgrade one needs to manually re-install the user-installed packages.
the documented process is pretty much algorithmic, so it seems like a
shame that it's not (mostly) automated.

the idea would be to simply dump the list of user-installed packages into
a config file which is preserved by sysupgrade. now, firstboot would see
that file and start opgk with it - that's usually going to just work, as
the network configuration is preserved as well. on top of that, luci
could offer a button in the software manager to manually trigger the
process in case the fully automated restoration didn't work out.

scripts for doing just that have been posted years ago, so i'm wondering
why such a mechanism wasn't integrated upstream. am i missing something,
or did just nobody think it important enough to do?


of course, this immediately prompts the next question: why doesn't
luci's flash operations page have an auto-download option for the
sysupgrade image? the locations of the package feeds are also inside the
image, and automating the integrity check isn't rocket science, either.

of course, it sort of makes sense to have a copy of the last working
sysupgrade image outside the router, and that's basically a side effect
of the manual process (unless one is dumb enough to delete/overwrite the
previous image). however, the option to download a sysupgrade image for
the running system could be provided as another backup option -
extracting/recreating it from the flash shouldn't be that hard, i guess?

thoughts?