Brokenness of the OpenWrt "packages" repo

[Alberto Bursi]

On 26/04/21 16:01, Daniel Golle wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 03:28:22PM +0200, Enrico Mioso wrote:
>> ... I know you won't like this. But in the end, I guess D-Bus, glib2 and in the end all of MM dependencies will have to be incorporated in the core.
>>
>> A stac, of big big software, I know. But supporting 4G/5G in the end will required that.
> 
> ModemManager is not the only way to use 4G/5G modems. You can use
> umbim or uqmi for most tasks. 

In my experience their ability to handle device-specific bugs or "perks" 
is limited, unless your modem is 100% perfect and never crashes ever and 
can actually handle the autoreconnect on its own, you will end up in 
situations where you need to just set up a script that pings Google and 
reboots the router if network fails.

They also don's support a lot of new LTE features like band lock, band 
aggregation and more, they are way too simple. I have bought a consumer 
modem/router that is like 3 times faster while using the same type of 
CAT6 modem due to band aggregation and the reconnect sequence if the 
connection drops is very fast because I have set the only 2 LTE bands it 
can use.

MM is so much better than that. But my main issue with MM is that both 
maintainers (package and upstream MM maintainers) have not found a way 
to integrate it well enough with OpenWrt's internals so that when the 
modem disconnects there is nothing that notices this issue and nothing 
that reacts to it. So I had to cobble together a script to do this 
missing link, but it's far from a decent solution. (see the issue thread 
I opened about this)

Hence why I eventually bought an actual self-contained modem with web 
interface and all, it's just so much better speed and is less painful to 
use.

-Alberto


Both projects are straight forward, well
> documented code, easy to extend in case you miss anything.
> Depending on half of the Freedesktop universe in order to initialize
> a network interface or receive an SMS in a very complicated way doesn't
> feel justified to me.
> 
> 
>>
>> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021, Bjørn Mork wrote:
>>
>>> Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2021 07:51:51
>>> From: Bjørn Mork <bjorn at mork.no>
>>> To: Etienne Champetier <champetier.etienne at gmail.com>
>>> Cc: Rosen Penev <rosenp at gmail.com>,
>>>      OpenWrt Development List <openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org>
>>> Subject: Re: Brokenness of the OpenWrt "packages" repo
>>>
>>> Etienne Champetier <champetier.etienne at gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Are you trying at the same time to complain about not run-tested
>>>> updates and possibly having packages not up to date ?
>>>
>>> No.  The package was fine before the version was changed.  In fact, it
>>> was in much better shape before it was changed to a development version
>>> by the very same non-maintainer.
>>>
>>> If you don't care enough to even install the package, then please don't
>>> touch the package.
>>>
>>>> I would personally mark it as broken or remove it instead of making it
>>>> work again, but it means removing some other packages.
>>>
>>> I'd be all for that, if you apply that rule to all the unmaintained
>>> packages in the repo.  It's a much better solution than having the repo
>>> full of arbitrary untested changes to unmaintained packages.
>>>
>>> Wrt dbus I'm pretty sure it would provoke an adoption.  There are
>>> multiple packages depending on it, and as the immediate reports tell
>>> you:  This particualr umaintained package is in active use.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bjørn
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> openwrt-devel mailing list
>>> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
>>> https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> openwrt-devel mailing list
>> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
>> https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> openwrt-devel mailing list
> openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
> https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
>