OpenWrt 21.02 status

[Luiz Angelo Daros de Luca]

> I believe what he meant to say was to make another 19.07.x point
> release with an updated sysupgrade mechanism which would improve the
> situation when upgrading to 21.02.x and, for example, allow
> flashing with non-matching DEVICE_COMPAT_VERSION already when
> specifying the '-n' flag to not keep configuration, but not require
> the '-F' flag which is scary for regular users (for good reasons).

That is exactly what I propose. We should somehow make sysupgrade in
19.07 be able
to understand a DSA image and allow an upgrade '-n' without warning and forces.
I think a package upgrade or a new package installation might be able
to do that. It touches the image
validation, which I guess happens before switch_root. It does not
invalidate the use of -F for older images
but it allows a safer path. We could have a new 19.07 point release
with that update, but it is just another way
to install the new/updated package.

I think all involved files in image validation are in base-files. I
think they should be in an individual package
to help upgrade them without touching the rest of the system. This
will not be the last time OpenWrt will need to prepare
an old version to deal with a new release image.

> > We can discuss this for the future, i.e. for updates starting at 21.xx, and we can discuss the exact wording of the message.

First we need a solution to offer the user.

> > > It would also be great if we could detect a config from a pre-dsa system and
> > > restore everything but skipping or renaming DSA relevant files (nework,
> > > wifi?) DSA) with a suffix like '.pre-dsa'.
> >
> > We had a very long delay due to DSA and nobody was even slightly interested in creating a migration script.
> > For partial migration, I suspect that implementing something here that is general will be much more complicated than just having the user select what he wants/needs.

This is not a migration script but a mitigation. A 21.02 image should
detect during boot if the current network config was for swconfig in a
system using DSA.
It could happen during early boot stages, after FS are mounted, before
services are started, something similar to uci-defaults, but not in a
"run once" way.
It would cover both upgrades with confs and restores. We are asking
the user to upgrade without saving confs but nothing will prevent them
from keeping settings while
using "sysupgrade -F" nor restoring an 19.07 backup "manually" into a
21.02. I think an expert dev could solve this one with a 5 line script
;-)

Regards,