[Cerowrt-devel] notes on going for a stable release

[Christopher Robin]

Thanks for these notes. As a user who's been frustrated in trying to
understand the state of CeroWrt and find a way to contribute, I find
this very helpful. I'm not sure what to make of the following though.

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 1:07 AM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> ** What is CeroWrt?
>
> Originally intended to prove out a bunch of AQM and scheduling ideas,
> it's done that. We proved dnssec was feasible, and simon kelly is
> doing that. ISC and openwrt got signed updates working recently, the
> only major update-in-the-field problem for openwrt is on updating
> kernels.
>
> CeroWrt is ALSO useful for day-to-day use, presently.


If CeroWrt has fulfilled it's original intentions, where does that
leave us now? What improvements is CeroWrt currently working on that
OpenWrt lacks? What's the end game?

I haven't been here long, but it seems to me that CeroWrt should avoid
being a distribution and instead stick to being a proof-of-concept
project. "Going stable" shouldn't mean having a release with bug fixes
that's ready for a production environment, it should mean having the
code tested to a point where it can be pushed upstream to OpenWrt to
implement into their releases. It should be about setting a new "close
enough" baseline to get testers/users to help stress test the new
code.

But I'm new here, and I don't fully understand the workflows and
ideologies involved. Maybe having a stable release is required to push
CeroWrt improvements upstream. Or maybe that's not what you guys are
aiming for.

Some questions that may help provide a better scope for the project:

How many users have CeroWrt running in a production environment (as
the primary router in a business)?
How many users have CeroWrt running as a primary or only router at home?
Is it a goal of this group to provide a CeroWrt build for businesses
to run as their /only/ edge router on and expect 24/7 uptime?
Is it a goal of this group to provide a CeroWrt build easy enough for
the average end user (grandma) to run on their only router?
....

Hrm, I'm rereading all the above and having difficulty liking it for
some reason so let me sum up.

***Are we here for research and development, or are we here for final
implementation?

If we're here for R&D then our "stable" build should be what most
distributions would consider as a beta. Something like we're 99%
certain it won't brick your router and 80-95% certain it won't be
unusable.

If we're trying to be a distribution for end users, we should really
look at expanding the number of routers we support.