Re: [Cerowrt-devel] [gluon] Introducing the LEDE project

[Jochen Demmer <jochen@winteltosh.de>]

Hi,

I'm looking forward to this as I your goals sound very appealing. I have 
zero knowledge about what went good and what didn't at/(in the 
background of) the OpenWrt project. But when your implications about the 
past problems are right, than I'm convinced they should be overcome.

What I'm curious about is:
* what tools will be used in order to prevent past obstacles, with 
special regard to communication?
* what methods will you be using to recuit more active members, while I 
believe it should be technically very easy to actively participate. I 
hope there is no exclusive focus on IRC and Mailing lists, as I consider 
both fringe group tools.
* Especially for power users/administrators. Will there be such an 
overwhelming amount of documentation one day? Compatible devices, but 
also operating manual etc.

My only concern is that this split might slow things down. I hope it 
won't.

Jochen Demmer

On 2016-05-03 20:55, John Crispin wrote:
> The LEDE project is founded as a spin-off of the OpenWrt project and
> shares many of the same goals. We are building an embedded Linux
> distribution that makes it easy for developers, system administrators 
> or
> other Linux enthusiasts to build and customize software for embedded
> devices, especially wireless routers. The name 'LEDE' stands for 'Linux
> Embedded Development Environment'.
> 
> Members of the project already include a significant share of the most
> active members of the OpenWrt community. We intend to bring new life to
> Embedded Linux development by creating a community with a strong focus
> on transparency, collaboration and decentralisation.
> 
> LEDE’s stated goals are:
> - Building a great embedded Linux distribution with focus on stability
> and functionality.
> - Having regular, predictable release cycles coupled with community
> provided device testing feedback.
> - Establishing transparent decision processes with broad community
> participation and public meetings.
> 
> We decided to create this new project because of long standing issues
> that we were unable to fix from within the OpenWrt project/community:
> 1. Number of active core developers at an all time low, no process for
> getting more new people involved.
> 2. Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by internal disagreements
> and single points of failure.
> 3. Lack of communication, transparency and coordination in the OpenWrt
> project, both inside the core team and between the core team and the
> rest of the community.
> 4. Not enough people with commit access to handle the incoming flow of
> patches, too little attention to testing and regular builds.
> 5. Lack of focus on stability and documentation.
> 
> To address these issues we set up the LEDE project in a different way
> compared to OpenWrt:
> 1. All our communication channels are public, some read-only to
> non-members to maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio.
> 2. Our decision making process is more open, with an approximate 50/50
> mix of developers and power users with voting rights.
> 3. Our infrastructure is simplified a lot, to ensure that it creates
> less maintenance work for us.
> 4. We have made our merge policy more liberal, based on our experience
> with the OpenWrt package github feed.
> 5. We have a strong focus on automated testing combined with a
> simplified release process.
> 
> We would like to thank the communities using the codebase and would
> welcome endorsements. If your community feels that the idea is good and
> will benefit all our communities as a whole then please post an
> endorsement on the lede-dev mailing list.
> 
> Find out more on our project website http://lede-project.org/
> 
> Daniel Golle
> Felix Fietkau
> Hauke Mehrtens
> Jo-Philipp Wich
> John Crispin
> Matthias Schiffer
> Steven Barth