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

[Jo-Philipp Wich]

Hi Oswald,

> 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?

as far as I remember there never was a clean patch series proposed to
implement such a behavior, therefore it was never discussed in-depth and
implemented.

> 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? 

Mainly due to the fact that it currently is impossible to
programmatically figure out the proper image to use for the currently
running device and that there was no fully defined release and
versioning cycle which makes checking for updates impossible.

> 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?

Right now it cannot be provided unless we provide suitable meta data for
that on the server side or - preferably - inside the image itself.

Right now that info is missing so it is impossible to implement that
solution.


~ Jo

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