Purpose of openwrt-devel?

Thu Mar 14 15:16:34 PDT 2024

Hey Daniel,

On 14-03-2024 02:40, Daniel Golle wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 05:50:36PM -0700, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
<snip>
> 
> Anyway. The true dependency on Github is everything they offer besides
> git:
> Bug tracker, Pull Requests, comments made on PRs, comments made on
> commits, ... scraping all that data is much more tricky should we ever
> desire to move that somewhere else.

Indeed. And while I certainly won't intend to dig up the GitLab vs 
github discussion, it's been had, it's been done, it's been decided. But 
this is what might have been missed in the earlier discussion. "Picking 
up and moving elsewhere" is much much harder now. With Gitlab (be it 
freedesktop's or whatever), you can export and self-host, keeping 
everything as yours.

And, afaik gitlab allows a more seemless mailinglist + gitforge 
integration. But the ship is sailed, so lets not dwell on this further 
(unless others seriously want to re-consider :p)

> 
> Imho for people who don't like following submitted patches as emails
> in their inbox there is patchwork.

I think patchwork is an atroctity to work with, but that's comming from 
someone who doesn't use it much and doesn't understand it, so I'm 
certainly biased.

> 
> Having everything in two places -- Github and patchwork -- certainly
> isn't perfect and I'd also rather want to see all that in a single
> one-size-fits-them-all interface like sourcehut. However, I also got
> neither resources nor experience in hosting such as service in the
> scale we would need.
Afaik gitlab does have mailing list integration-ish support. But again, 
it was decided, and until we re-evaluate, it is what it is.

And those are my 2 ;)

Olliver

> 
> Just my 2 cents.
> 
>>
>>
>>>> Huh.  Parts of that look suspicious.  Those commit messages look *very*
>>>> similar to my version 2.  I was jumping between documentation sources
>>>> when writing it.
>>
>>> Not sure what is surprising to you, since the mail thread was listed in
>>> the MR and your perl code was even referenced (not _directly_ I admit).
>>> Obviously I was using your messaging format as that was discussed on the
>>> mailing list and I didn't want to deviate from those messages, also they
>>> made a lot of sense anyway. "Fair Use" if anything :p
>>
>> A Court of Law would need to decide Fair Use, but I'm pretty sure this
>> would fail.  Good news is this isn't enough to bother.
>>
>>> The actual code of course has nothing to do with the perl script, as you
>>> right full say 'I know nothing of perl', as does probably most of the
>>> development community by now. Which is sad for perl, but 'it is what it is'.
>>>
>>> In no way was there any ill intent. I just wanted my kernel tree bump
>>> for the realtek target, and didn't want to install, learn etc perl to
>>> try things out. Sorry for that on my part.
>>
>> The real problem here is you made two critical errors in your handling
>> of this.
>>
>> First, credit the original author for everything.  Open source depends
>> heavily on reputation so letting people know doing this as a script was
>> my idea has high value to me.  I take the above as an apology, so there
>> there is little to do, besides drop this portion.
>>
>> Second, I knew nothing of https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/14713
>> until yesterday and Robert Marko mentioning something, triggering me to
>> go searching:
>> https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2024-March/042423.html
>> Had I known of the pull earlier I would have gone to #14713, but I had no
>> idea the discussion had been diverted away to GitHub.
>>
>> In light of this, I think the qualities of the two scripts and their
>> merits should be considered.
>>
>>
>> One item I was trying to draw attention to was perhaps the current
>> approach to handling kernel version changes isn't very good.  If you're
>> trying to change configuration which effects multiple devices, you end up
>> having to *constantly* watch out for configuration files appearing and
>> disappearing.  This is painful to deal with.
>>
>> This has the useful advantage of producing fewer merge commits.  Instead
>> of 44 merges/kernel version, there would be only 1.  I estimate OpenWRT
>> is doing around 3000 commits/year, so this is 1.5% versus 0.03% commit
>> merges.  If a typical bisect session touches 12 commits then this is
>> 16.5% versus 0.45% encountering a merge.  Then there are sessions which
>> encounter 2+ merges.
>>
>>
>> The biggest difference between the two isn't the language choice, but
>> the overall designs.  Your shell script is essentially replicating the
>> actions a human at a shell might take to perform the task (more or less
>> precisely the actions suggested by the original source).  As such you
>> likely recognize all the commands used in the script.
>>
>> My Perl script uses a very different approach.  Pretty much all of Git's
>> interface is designed to be readily parseable and useful for scripting.
>> Some portions are really meant /only/ for script use and not meant for
>> interactive use.
>> The real reason everyone was having a hard time understanding my script
>> was not that it was written in Perl.  The real reason everyone was having
>> a hard time with the script is relatively few people are ever exposed to
>> `git fast-import`.  Since 75% of the script is interacting with
>> `git fast-import` you'll be lost without having at least passing
>> familiarity.
>>
>> Since `git fast-import` is a direct interface to Git's back-end, the
>> working tree doesn't need to be modified to operate.  This also means
>> mine is *much* faster and can create precisely tailored commits.
>>
>> (if someone wishes to learn about `git fast-import`, I suggest starting
>> by playing with `git fast-export`, you may want to use "--no-data" to
>> omit noise you don't want to play with)
>>
>>
>> I had been estimating the shell script would be 2-4 orders of
>> magnitude slower than my Perl script.  I now see the flaw in this belief.
>> I had been operating on the assumption the shell script was doing a
>> roughly comparable job to the Perl script.  Turns out the shell script
>> *strictly* targets the kernel configuration files.  Whereas the Perl
>> script targets *all* kernel-related files.
>>
>> The patches don't get nearly as much press as the kernel configuration
>> files, but they actually have more influence than the configuration.  As
>> someone who has in fact found bugs in the OpenWRT kernel patches, they
>> seem just as valid for this treatment as the configuration.
>>
>> Due to invoking Git for every single operation it does, the shell script
>> needs to invoke Git roughly 80 times for its present operation.  If it
>> was modified to be on-par with the Perl script, it would invoke Git
>> about 110 times.  This would be massively slower since it needs to modify
>> the working tree to do its job.
>>
>> Meanwhile the Perl script invokes Git 5 times and never touches the
>> working tree, nor interacts with anything besides Git.
>>
>>
>> So, my belief is my Perl script provides better functionality and is
>> much faster while doing so.  (yes, as the author of course my stuff is
>> better!)
>>
>>
>> -- 
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>>
>>
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