[OpenWrt-Devel] Hamburg 2019 developer meeting details

Wed Jul 10 12:21:58 EDT 2019

Hello Petr and all
Thanks for the detailed update about the meeting in Hamburg.

I wanted to make a some comments about a few points I consider important
for the project as someone that has been here for a while.

- Release Manager - I fully support it. It is something I suggested a while
ago in the form of an Elected Project Leader similar to Debian, but some
people confused with an autocrat who would assign tasks and ask people all
the time and didn't like at the time (and which my message had nothing to
do with it obviously). I consider not only necessary but essential having
an Release Manager responsible for gather all necessary things together,
organize dates in advance, engage the right people, etc, in order for a new
release to come up in a organized way and within defined deadlines. It is
just that, nothing else. Whenever there is some name already highlighted a
motion should be moved to ratify him/her and move on. While that is still
not possible having 3 people who can create releases is prudent.

- Future Releases every 6 months - Seems a reasonable time to have this
commitment. Even if it happens to be yearly as long there are regular point
releases.

- Number of Releases to be Supported - 2 looks fine to me, but don't think
it should be something 'written on stone'. Depending on the situation it
could be 3 temporarily upon developers decision when it justifies to extend
a previous version due justified circumstances (must think what is most
useful for users in general as well).

- 4/32MB devices - Good to see there was a discussion around it. These
devices are still a reality, quite usable, that can't be ignored and having
them supported for a little while is something good for the whole
ecosystem. Just saying "buy a new 8/64MB device and throw the other away"
isn't something practical and both sides of the coin should be well
reasoned. Good decision.

- New people, Contributions and Voting Access - Agree that commit access
and voting should not be binding as in early days. New rules and roles
should be agreed and vote restricted to those not only with frequent
contributions but also with a proven past history of contribution to the
project and that obviously represents majority of OpenWrt workforce. Having
some way to thank contributions is certainly something positive and welcome.

Forum/Wiki maintainers - Perhaps there can be a kind of committee of
people. I personally fell the Wiki constantly demands some love to be kept
updated and and with the right information for people seeking. These people
could more easily engage developers and contributors in general and to have
any important information about a device or architecture updated as soon at
that it is available in the code. Also getting used to update wiki pages
beforehand or right after a commit is something in my view very positive
and that should be encouraged.

Best regards
Fernando
On 10/07/2019 07:07, Petr Štetiar wrote:

tl;dr: 19.07 was branched, ar71xx is gone, we got some beers & pizzas

Hi all,

I'm writing on the behalf of OpenWrt team members attending the OpenWrt
meeting in Hamburg, which has happened a month ago, so it's about time to
publish some outcome :-)

Most of us met in the late afternoon on Sunday 9th June in a nice local pub
with a great beer selection, together with the Debian folks attending
MiniDebConfHamburg[1].

On Monday 10th June, we started right in the morning in one of the conference
rooms, where we sat down in the circle, introduced ourselves and provided
answers to the "What brings you here?" question. Shortly after this everyone
got marker and paper cards, writing down arbitrary number of topics he would
like to discuss during the following days. Then we put those cards on two
boards, merging similar topics together where applicable.

As you can imagine, this activity has produced a lot of topics, so we needed
to prioritize, so each attendee got five pins, each of those pins represented
one vote, topics with most pins (votes) were discussed first (topics with no
votes were discussed with a soft timer, 6 minutes dedicated to each topic,
where time was extended as needed).

With much discussion, we wrote down all the topics, ideas, TODOs to the
ChaosPad. After the meeting, we cleaned it up, transfered to our wiki[2],
reordered, added some photos and more details.

In the evening we went to some local place with a good pizza, where we
spontaneously decided that it's just right time to branch 19.01 finally (just
about 6 months later, yeah!) and lynxis created that branch as openwrt-19.07
around 21:33 CEST.  You can find a photo of this branching event at the
meeting's wiki[2] page as well.

Then we moved back to Dock Europe[3] venue, where we continued discussing some
of the topics till the early morning.

On Tuesday 11th June we got a visit from h01ger, Debian developer and one of
the developers behind reproducible-builds.org so we've used this opportunity
to talk about improvements in reproducible OpenWrt. As we were discussing
possible migration from GitHub to GitLab just a few moments ago, and as we
knew, that Debian has switched to GitLab recently, we talked with h01ger
little bit about Debian's experience with GitLab as well and h01ger has
provided mostly positive feedback. Some of the topics were discussed till the
early morning again.

Activity during the Wednesday 12th June was similar to the previous days, we
were discussing remaining topics, diving back into the details of previous
topics, but finally we had first live demonstration, where lynxis presented us
with his work-in-progress of automated testing on real hardware.

To sum it up, it was a time very well spent, we were able to touch a lot of
topics in those 3 days, which would otherwise take as ages to process and we
hope, that if we manage to tackle at least 33% of those topics it could
translate in a huge progress forward for the project as a whole.

We're looking forward to our next meeting, where we hope, that we'll actually
finally hack on some topics together instead of "just" discussing them.

1. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/de/2019/MiniDebConfHamburg
2. https://openwrt.org/meetings/hamburg2019/start
3. https://www.dock-europe.net/

Cheers,

OpenWrt team members attending Hamburg meeting

_______________________________________________
openwrt-adm mailing
listopenwrt-adm at lists.openwrt.orghttp://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-adm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/attachments/20190710/7916c2b6/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
openwrt-devel mailing list
openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel