[OpenWrt-Devel] OpenWrt 20.X release plans

[Hauke Mehrtens]

Hi,

I meet with jow about 2 weeks ago and we talked about a lot of OpenWrt
related stuff, one of the topics was the release after 19.07.

As the 19.07 release is now done, I would like to follow up on this topic.

We thought that the time between the 19.07 branch and the final release
was way too long, this should be much shorter in the next release, we
should target 8 weeks for that.

My preferred timeline would the the following:
* Beginning of February: freeze master for big changes (adding new
boards is no problem)
* Beginning of March: branch off 20.3 release branch
* 1 week after the branch was created: tag and build 20.3-rc1
* 3 weeks later tag and build 20.3-rc2
* 3 weeks later tag and build 20.3 final

Then we would do the next final release in May 2020.

This plan is based on using kernel 4.19, if we use kernel 5.4 I would
assume we have to shift all dates by 3 months, so branch off in
beginning of June and final release in August.

Koen is working on adding generic 5.4 support and also some targets are
already ported, I assume the generic part should be finished soon:
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/staging/xback.git;a=shortlog

We had a longer discussion which kernel to use here:
https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2019-November/020403.html
There was also a discussion about this in IRC some days ago.

I think we will get some years of LTS support for both versions, as
Android will probably use kernel 4.19 and 5.4 and then Google wants to
have LTS support from Greg Kroah-Hartman & Sasha Levin. Support for
kernel 4.19 was announced till December 2020, but it is used in Debian
and in the past Ben Hutchings took over and maintained Debian kernels
longer, like he still does for kernel 3.16. For previous kernel versions
the 5 year LTS support was also announced later.

I am fine with kernel 4.19 or 5.4, but we should decide and not stay in
a limbo for log, so we can work io the right direction.

If we decide for kernel 4.19 I am fine with adding kernel 5.4 support to
master and add it as testing kernel to some targets in master. We can
then branch off the next release in October with kernel 5.4.


It would be nice to have jails activated by default, but there are still
problems when using an initramfs, I will probably not have the time to
investigate into this problem in the next 4 weeks.

Should wpad-openssl or better wpad-wolfssl (after it works with WPA3) be
added as default wpad version now? If we do this we can also activate
https support for luci by default https support should not cost much
space when we already have an ssl library.

Are there any other bigger changes planned you would like to get into
the next release?

Should we do a vote on the kernel version and release plan in the end?
The most important thing to get this done is that someone takes care and
does the branching, releasing and keeping an overview.

Hauke

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