[PATCH 0/2] TP-Link safeloader custom soft-version support

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On 31/08/2021 17:42, Sander Vanheule wrote:
> On Sat, 2021-08-28 at 10:24 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
>> On 27/08/2021 06:38, Sander Vanheule wrote:
>>>
>>> EAP235-Wall support will be included in the 21.02 release, but users who
>>> have a v3 (or later) firmware installed, will not be able to install
>>> those images due to OpenWrt's "0.0.0" soft-version. Eiter both patches
>>> need to be included in 21.02, or users need to first install a snapshot
>>> image before they can install a 21.02 release image. How would PKG_RELEASE
>>> conflicts be avoided for backported patches?
>>
>> These kind of changes are among the most useful targets for backporting
>> to any OpenWRT release **that actually supports the affected models**
>> (or along the backport of such support).
>>
>> So, if 19.07 can actually support the EAP235-WALL v1, it would make
>> extreme sense to backport the changes to 19.07, for example.  The same
>> for 18.06 -- in which case it would be an unofficial backport, as that
>> tree is EOL/closed.
> 
> What I was actually wondering about, is the PGK_RELEASE value of tools/firmware-utils.
> My patch (for master) bumps this value from 9 to 10. However, the PKG_RELEASE in the
> 21.02-branch is still at 7. If the first patch was backported with a PKG_RELEASE bump,
> there would now be two different versions of firmware-utils that bear the same PKG_RELEASE
> number of 8. Maybe this was already discussed earlier, but I don't recall.

IMHO: use a second level, as in "7.1" in that case.  Or "8.1" if you got 
all changes that make up for PKG_RELEASE 8 (and there are still 
differences -- if there are no differences, you use just "8").

> The EAP235-Wall is already included in the 21.02 branch, but the firmware-utils package
> from that branch cannot build images that are compatible with the latest vendor firmware
> for this device. This will probably result in confused users.

Yeah, looks like a very worthwhile backport to me.

> To come back to your point of backporting device support for this device to 19.07, that
> would be non-trivial. The ramips target changed to DSA with 21.02, and a kernel patch was

Then we don't backport it to 19.07 :-)  it was just an example.

-- 
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
Analista de Projetos
Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas em Tecnologias de Redes e Operações 
(Ceptro.br)
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