[PATCH 0/2] TP-Link safeloader custom soft-version support

[Sander Vanheule]

On Sat, 2021-08-28 at 10:24 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On 27/08/2021 06:38, Sander Vanheule wrote:
> > 
> > EAP235-Wall support will be included in the 21.02 release, but users who
> > have a v3 (or later) firmware installed, will not be able to install
> > those images due to OpenWrt's "0.0.0" soft-version. Eiter both patches
> > need to be included in 21.02, or users need to first install a snapshot
> > image before they can install a 21.02 release image. How would PKG_RELEASE
> > conflicts be avoided for backported patches?
> 
> These kind of changes are among the most useful targets for backporting 
> to any OpenWRT release **that actually supports the affected models** 
> (or along the backport of such support).
> 
> So, if 19.07 can actually support the EAP235-WALL v1, it would make 
> extreme sense to backport the changes to 19.07, for example.  The same 
> for 18.06 -- in which case it would be an unofficial backport, as that 
> tree is EOL/closed.

What I was actually wondering about, is the PGK_RELEASE value of tools/firmware-utils.
My patch (for master) bumps this value from 9 to 10. However, the PKG_RELEASE in the
21.02-branch is still at 7. If the first patch was backported with a PKG_RELEASE bump,
there would now be two different versions of firmware-utils that bear the same PKG_RELEASE
number of 8. Maybe this was already discussed earlier, but I don't recall.

The EAP235-Wall is already included in the 21.02 branch, but the firmware-utils package
from that branch cannot build images that are compatible with the latest vendor firmware
for this device. This will probably result in confused users.

To come back to your point of backporting device support for this device to 19.07, that
would be non-trivial. The ramips target changed to DSA with 21.02, and a kernel patch was
required to get the built-in switch to work. And then there are probably still other
patches that I don't know about.

Best,
Sander