[OpenWrt-Hackers] State of the Union

[Zoltan HERPAI]

Hello Jo,

Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:
> Hello Imre,
>
>   
[snip]

>> I would like to let you know that Mike is fine transferring the
>> domain name to SPI. It's up to him to decide if he subsequent
>> meetingwants to do the legal part of it - if not, I'll do. Having
>> more people with root access to the OpenWrt infrastructure was also
>> requested, Florian has root for quite some time now - I hope he was
>> able to find his way around already ;)
>>     
>
> That is great news!
>
>   
>> I believe there are topics we developers have to agree on and there
>> are topics we should ask the community about. As you might remember,
>> Hauke sent out the meeting notes on all past meetings. To be
>> completely open, they went out as-is, which might have been confusing
>> for some people. On the OpenWrt Summit we've said we all want to
>> merge and on the next meeting we've agreed to stick to the OpenWrt
>> name and sail under the same flag.
>>     
>
> I'd like to point out here that this does not reflect the opinion of all
> LEDE participants. I'll personally support whatever majority decision
> is made (and more importantly, implemented) in the end but personally I
> have zero interest in sticking to the OpenWrt name under all
> circumstances.
>   
The name/flag question was discussed on our very first meeting at the 
OpenWrt Summit, which most of the LEDE members took part in. It was also 
brought up on the meetings scheduled by Hauke, where also most of the 
LEDE members took part. We believed that what was discussed at the 
Summit or at the meetings, represented what LEDE believed or wanted to 
achieve - or if it didn't, a voting should have taken place in the last 
two months since our last meeting.


>> This decision isn't up for the grabs, and I believe we've made the
>> right choice on this one. Our community also includes the industry,
>> and their efforts, contributions and needs should be also taken care
>> of.
>>     
>
> I fail to see the connection between "the industry" and using the
> OpenWrt name here, can you elaborate on that?
>   

----
>> Deciding on how the merged infrastructure will work or how will we 
>> handle some work-flow questions are also something I would call an 
>> "internal decision"
>>     
>
> Deciding infrastructure details is certainly fine within a limited,
> internal circle but establishing and enforcing work flows is a topic
> which concerns a wider audience that should at least include frequent
> contributors and downstream users.
>
>   
>> - but there are open questions where I strongly believe we are not
>> the ones who call the shots. To name a few, I have doubts on how user
>> friendly the LEDE forum engine is vs punbb (what we use for OpenWrt),
>> and we should ask the community on which one should remain at the
>> end.
>>     
>
> Asking the community about their preferred forum choice is the right
> thing to do. Wiki can be decided as well but since both OpenWrt and LEDE
> use Dokuwiki there isn't really much to decide about the engine, it just
> boils down to the question on where to shovel the content to.
>
>   
>> Choosing the wiki engine should be next topic and there are a few
>> more where we should have a survey - most of our community never uses
>> the mailing lists.
>>     
>
> It should be no problem to setup a survey or poll on the OpenWrt and
> LEDE forums, it is just a matter of educating people about possible
> choices and presenting viable options.
>   
----
Sure, I certainly agree with the 3 points above.


>> All in all, I hereby would like to ask for another (hopefully final) 
>> meeting between the sides. I strongly believe it's time to really
>> bury the hatchet and continue working for the greater good -
>> together.
>>     
>
> Before we schedule another meeting you should prepare a detailed agenda
> first to allow us to concentrate on the actual decision making.
>
> Some points that require agreements and resolutions are:
>
>
>   
[snip]

> --
>
> I can not speak on behalf of other community members but here's a few
> personal thoughts and questions:
>
>  - Imho there is not much worth in keeping the OpenWrt source tree
>    around. We can merge the outstanding changes to Chaos Calmer since
>    the founding of LEDE into the Chaos Calmer branch on git.lede-
>    project.org (but we have to figure out how to deal with the
>    rewritten history) and pick the few relevant changes from OpenWrt
>    master into the LEDE master branch.
>
>  - I am still unclear about what project I would be actually merging
>    with. By now all former and active OpenWrt developers should have
>    (or easily can get) push access to source.git but there has been
>    very little contributions from the "OpenWrt side" in both the
>    OpenWrt or LEDE repositories. Can we expect some actual effort from
>    the "OpenWrt side" in the future or will things quickly fall back
>    into a pattern where a few people having *@openwrt.org mail
>    addresses are claiming to represent the project while the actual
>    development work and (non-industrial) community interaction is done
>    by others?
>   
The amount of contributions to the OpenWrt tree was limited for a 
reason, which was again discussed at the Summit. To recap, to avoid 
double work - to commit a change into the OpenWrt tree and then have to 
re-work to the LEDE tree at the time of the merge -, we intentionally 
limited contributions to the tree. While in the community's (and 
possibly the industry's) view this obviously put us in a much worse 
position, we made this decision to make the merge an easier task, which 
is / was pursued by both parties.

To reflect on the representation, we can go through a list of such 
things from the past if You'd like, but a more recent one is that some 
members of the LEDE team calls the release an OpenWrt/LEDE release on 
public forums, while I guess it should be called LEDE release to avoid 
misunderstandings.


>  - For me the LEDE arrangement currently works well and so far I see
>    nothing I would personally gain from re-merging with OpenWrt as a
>    project or OpenWrt as defined by its infrastructure. Strictly
>    speaking it would only incur work and, with no good plan for the
>    merger in place, delays and confusion as well as tied up resources
>    better spent in release engineering and bug fixing.
>
> --
>
> The only viable way I *personally* see is letting all LEDE and OpenWrt
> developers participate in LEDE, redirect OpenWrt to LEDE and start
> shaping the common project within the laid out rules to address the
> majorities view on how things should work. Then we can start thinking
> about renaming LEDE back to OpenWrt together.
>   
Thanks for your personal insights. What I *personally* would like to see 
then is a joint statement from the LEDE team about what they would like 
to be achieved. Given that Felix called the thread starter mail and the 
advancements listed by Imre a "positive thing" (could be a personal 
note) on a public forum, and your mail seems to tell a bit otherwise 
(could be a personal note again), it would be great to see the direction 
LEDE aims to go, and/or what the industry and/or OpenWrt could expect 
from it.

Regards,
Zoltan Herpai