[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCH][CC] Revert "ar71xx: change some TP-link modelnames (WR841, WA701, WA730)"

[kwadronaut]

On 25/04/16 09:06, John Crispin wrote:
> On 25/04/2016 08:54, Bastian Bittorf wrote:
>> * John Crispin <john at phrozen.org> [25.04.2016 07:39]:
>>>> The changed image name breaks compatibility for derived projects and
>>>> that's something which should only happen if there is a really good
>>>> reason (e.g. security fix).
>>>
>>> how does it beak compatibility ?
>>
>> I think they auto-download a preconfigured filename,
>> which will ofcource not succeed. We circumvented this in our
>> network-autoupdater in a way, that we download e.g. "$MODELNAME.bin"
>> where $MODELNAME is from '/tmp/sysinfo/model' e.g. 'TP-Link TL-WDR4900 v1'
>> and on the downloadserver we can "adjust" the symlinks...
>>
>> I'am against reverting the commit. Lets keep it, because it makes sense.

It doesn't make sense to change naming conventions within a stable
release. For a next stable release, sure fine, go ahead, there it *does*
make sense.

>> Maybe i can give a short talk at Battlemesh v9 about proper autoupdates,
>> because we have ~10 years experience in this (including 500 dead devices
>> 8-)))

I agree, over the years everyone keeps improving and once in a while
that hurts, but auto-updates isn't what we're aiming for.

> before i merged the patch i did actually look at the compat issue and
> concluded that only docs will be out of date, which is not really
> anything new. all issues mentioned are home made ones. specially the one

If tomorrow Sasha Levin thinks that the LTS-kernel release of 4.1 should
be called 4.1-21 instead of 4.1.21 nothing really breaks. Except a bunch
of home made scripts. And some distributions will need to take care of
their autobuilds. And a lot of people will spend useless time into
figuring out what broke in which way, and they will be angry or sad. An
attitude of "Don't break current stable" is a very healthy one. When
however you add or change behavior, you save that for a new release.

> bastian mentions here. basically fixing your download script and
> deploying it in this way will break forward compat as can be seen here.
> 
> we now face the decision of reverting and unbreaking out of tree issues
> that can be fixed easily or avoided in future or not revert it and keep
> the fix that makes the filenames more consistent. adding the "n" is
> after all correct ad the antenna is not "not" detachable on the relevant
> models.

This sounds like a minor pain.

kwadronaut
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