Release goals for 20.XX

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Hi

[Disclaimer: I'm not an OpenWrt developer]

On 2020-07-31, baptiste at bitsofnetworks.org wrote:
[...]
> Possibly missing goals are:
>
> 1) major feature: 802.11ax and ath11k support?
>
>    I don't know the current state of this.

I don't think this is going to happen for a 20.xy.0 release, basically
there are only two platforms for this on the horizon at the moment:

- QCA ipq807x/ ath11k:
  so far ath11k is exclusively available for the ipq807x SOC family
  (dedicated PCIe/ m.2 cards have just appeared on the market, PCIe
  support for ath11k is not completely merged upstream yet), but while
  basic -incomplete- target support already exists in master, not a
  single device is supported at this point (missing parts, PCIe,
  ethernet, ath11k technically also isn't available in master so far).
  While there is quite some interest and activity around this target,
  predominantly around the Xiaomi AX3600, I don't think this will make
  it soon (enough) for a 20.xy.0 stable release - not ruling it out
  completely, but a lot would have to happen in short time.

- Mediatek mt7915e 802.11ax wireless
  The first devices of this kind appear to favour the older mips based
  mt7621a SOC, so support for these could appear quite quickly -
  depending on the current state of mt7615e support in the mt76 driver
  (it's still very new/ under development, no idea how far that has been
  developed at this point), but so far none of these routers/ APs is
  support by OpenWrt yet (and I'm not aware of any pending pull requests
  adding support for these either).
  A more natural (faster) combination would be the mt7622 ARMv8 SOC, but
  this is also a rather new target with few supported devices whose
  practical support is also just shaping up (none of those come with
  mt7915e WLAN at this moment either). So far I haven't seen any
  mt7622a+mt7915e on the market (nor any announcements) yet.

Both 802.11ax contenders will probably have to wait for a 21.xy.0, even
though ipq807x might be close.

[...]

> 3) organisational: switch to gitlab?
>
>    While there was a vote about it, I don't know if this is planned
>    for 20.XX.  I think it makes sense: we could start using gitlab to
>    track 20.XX bug reports, and possibly drop 18.06 bug reports from
>    flyspray.  But if it is not ready, it should probably not block the
>    20.XX release.

This has imho no direct relation to the release, it's mostly invisible
behind the curtain for the ordinary user - their interaction with the
git repositories is close to zero, bugs are only filed at bugs.openwrt.org
anyways, the binary repos pushed from downloads.openwrt.org and the
canonical location of the git repos is git.openwrt.org (github is just a
mirror and the package feeds are a different question alltogether). This
migration to gitlab can happen at any point and doesn't need to be tied
to a release.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann