OpenWrt 21.02 status

[Hannu Nyman]

Hauke Mehrtens wrote at Sun Aug 29 02:53:47 PDT 2021:

 > Should we just release with this as a known problem?
 >
 > Other than this problem I am not aware of any other critical problem.

We should.

It is annoying that 21.02 was branched more than 6 months ago, but no final 
release has happened by now. Due to the prolonged release process lots of 
"new" stuff has already been backported (unlike originally intended) causing 
potential new problems, and that will accumulate more the further we wait for 
the final release.

As we depend to a large part also on upstream developments (on kernel and 
packages), we will never get perfect releases.

The 21.02 release is also keeping the kernel 5.10 bump for many targets 
hostage (which is then preventing DSA bump, e.g. ipq806x), so that we can 
keep testing 5.4 in master for the benefit of 21.02.
(reference to the kernel list at 
https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2021-August/036159.html

Looking back at the history, this 21.02 starts to be the longest period 
between major releases (especially if we calculate 15.05.1 as a major release).

Lets get this 20.01, 20.07, 20.12, 21.02 finally out before it turns to be 
22.xx in practice...

I think that the original (LEDE) release process goal was relatively 
frequently branched releases and then doing the final releases quickly after 
branching.  We have now reverted back to the old "let's wait long for 
branching and then wait even longer for the actual release".

The reality is the same than earlier: almost all devs and enthusiasts are 
already with master where interesting new stuff happens, so 21.02 rots 
quietly waiting for the release. The prolonged wait serves nobody :-(