[OpenWrt-Hackers] State of the Union

[Alexandros C. Couloumbis]

has this ever been made in the past?

meaning a fork/split and then a successful rejoin ?

if yes then there is still hope for the European Union ...

seriously, forks are healthy/useful for the openness and evolution of 
open-source projects.

openwrt was many times forked in the past: freewrt, librewrt, gargoyle 
while opwenwrt kept going and going without any problems.

but no matter what, everything has a life cycle, even EU :)

just my 0.002 drachmas

On 2017-02-28 14:17, Zoltan HERPAI wrote:
> 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
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