State of OpenWrt wiki and alternatives

[Paul Spooren]

Hello again,

I worked together with the developers Soif (ToH) and Dmitry Marakasov (repology.org) and moved things forward.

## Table of hardware

We now have a new table of hardware, which is a JavaScript rendered searchable overview, receiving device data directly from our wiki.
It’s hosted on codeberg.page, which doesn’t involve any additional infrastructure needs from our end.
Please have a look at it and share your thoughts:

https://toh.openwrt.org/

The source code is available at codeberg (just a mirror) and GitHub: 

https://codeberg.org/openwrt/toh-openwrt-org
https://github.com/soif/OpenWrtTOH

The GitHub repository will be moved to our OpenWrt organization account, living next to the Firmware Selector et al.

## Packages

Dmitry kindly did some tweaks around the package index parsing and now we now have a very convenient overview on repology.org <http://repology.org/>.
Since Snapshots moved to APK and use a different index format, supporting those indexes will take a bit more time but will be added shortly.

https://repology.org/projects/?inrepo=openwrt_24_10_x86_64
https://repology.org/repository/openwrt_23_05_x86_64

I thought about a better implementation than this, since we don’t want just the x86 packages but all of them. This is more involved since we have no “simple” way to output everything, some packages are limited to specific targets.
There might be a way to extend `./scripts/package-metadata.pl pkgmanifestjson tmp/.packageinfo` to show “all” packages, however that something I need to look into.

## Moving further

With that in place I’ll edit the wiki pages and “suggest” users to use the new services. I’ll leave the old stuff in place for now but would remove it eventually, lowering the burden of our infrastructure.

Thanks for you patience,
Paul


> On 17. Feb 2025, at 13:37, Paul Spooren <mail at aparcar.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I’m writing here since the topic is not only administratively but concerns developers, too.
> 
> Historically openwrt.org was managed by two kind administrators which (to my knowledge) moved on to other things. The website is based on DokuWiki and is now in a semi ideal state, a bunch of AI scraper bots slowing it down further. Some new admins stepped up and help to maintain things (i.e. blocking bots), however things are not great.
> 
> Again historically, the wiki kept track of packages[1] and devices[2] with the help of rather complex shell scripts, now outdated but a feast for scrapping bots. At some point in the past, Jo and me converted the table of hardware (aka supported devices) into a JavaScript generated overview, massively lowering the load on the website. Nonetheless, if you look hard enough[3], there are still many linked pages using the legacy system and thereby overloading the server. While writing this email, I realize that all “package” views[4] are legacy and again, very heavy on the server.
> 
> I’m suggesting the following immediate changes which will take some time/effort but hopefully result in something with low maintenance in the future:
> 
> * Remove all “packages” form the Wiki, this results in endless amounts of outdated pages, last pages are for 21.02 which is EOL
> * Spin up some scripts which parses the “newly” introduced index.json file[5] and render a static page every 24 hours, adopt what Alpine does[6], something I tested last year[7] or offer a format supported by Repology[12] and let them do the rendering
> * Drop all “table of hardware” views, deploy and link the much better overview from @soif[8]
> 
> These steps should remove the endless clobber of pages likely no human actually uses due to endless loading times. If there are no voices against these steps, I’d setup toh.openwrt.org and change.
> 
> If we feel fancy, we could move on to a more modern appearance overall. We could render devices pages like LineageOS does, I did some adoption loooong time ago[9]. Combined with the work of @soif this could become quite handy. Feeling even fancies, we could move to a more modern wiki software[10] or have technical documentation rendered[11] based on a Git repository.
> 
> Looking forward to your thoughts.
> 
> Best,
> Paul
> 
> [1]: https://openwrt.org/packages/start
> [2]: https://openwrt.org/supported_devices
> [3]: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_admin_available
> [4]: https://openwrt.org/packages/table/start
> [5]: https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/24.10.0/packages/aarch64_cortex-a53/base/index.json
> [6]: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages
> [7]: https://github.com/aparcar/pkgbrowser
> [8]: https://soif.github.io/OpenWrtTOH/
> [9]: https://aparcar.org/openwrt-devices/devices/tp-link_tl-wdr4300/
> [10]: https://docmost.com/
> [11]: https://docusaurus.io/
> [12]: https://repology.org/repository/openwrt_23_05_x86_64


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP
URL: <http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/attachments/20250306/26dfa671/attachment.sig>