Release goals for 22.XX

[Rui Salvaterra]

Hi, Rich,

On Wed, 6 Oct 2021 at 17:54, Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Paul, Rafał,
>
> I think our emails passed in the ether... (http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2021-October/036637.html)
>
> As I said in that message, I am very aware of the time constraints of the volunteers for OpenWrt. And I don't mean to suck the conversation into "grand strategies" without any endpoint.
>
> Let's focus on our next step. In my earlier note, I asked:
>
> 1) What would prevent us from accomplishing the 22.XX Release Goals in March 2022? (https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/releases/goals/22.xx)
>
> - How do we see the time between now and March playing out?
> - Are there things we should leave out? Or should the release date be shifted?

I think the target date is fine, as long as we don't try to bite more
than we can chew. :)
I'm a bit wary of the firewall4 migration, to be honest. Do we have
performance numbers comparing nftables vs iptables, for complex rule
sets? I'm asking because nftables can be slower than iptables [1], in
at least in some scenarios.

I also believe the priority should be to get all targets at 5.10 by
default and to drop those which are stuck at 5.4 for some reason
(small flash/RAM, unmaintained, etc.). And a dropped target doesn't
mean it's gone forever, it can always be revived in the future, with
enough interest, talent and Git. :) With this out of the way, bumping
mac80211 to 5.15 is probably the hardest task at hand and, after it's
done, I think we're release-worthy. Anything else (say, DSA for ath79
targets with qca8k switches) would be a nice bonus, but never a
release blocker.

Just my 0.02 €. Thoughts?

Thanks,
Rui

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=BPFILTER-2021