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The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

From:  Jo-Philipp Wich <jow-AT-openwrt.org>
To:  OpenWrt Development List <openwrt-devel-AT-lists.openwrt.org>, OpenWrt User List <openwrt-users-AT-lists.openwrt.org>
Subject:  Introducing the LEDE project
Date:  Tue, 3 May 2016 18:59:55 +0100
Message-ID:  <5179f6d1-283a-1b40-d717-2730c3408326@openwrt.org>
Archive‑link:  Article

Hi,

we'd like to introduce LEDE, a reboot of the OpenWrt community
.

The 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

If you're interested in participating or want to learn more about the
project, check out https://www.lede-project.org/.


Sincerely,

Jo-Philipp Wich,
John Crispin,
Daniel Golle,

Felix Fietkau,

Hauke Mehrtens

John Crispin

Matthias Schiffer,

Steven Barth
_______________________________________________
openwrt-devel mailing list
openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org
https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwr...



to post comments

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 4, 2016 12:56 UTC (Wed) by accumulator (guest, #95885) [Link]

As one of the stated problems is the low amount of (core) developers, isn't it a good idea to merge with other efforts, like OpenEmbedded? Or are these two communities too different technically or philosophically that this isn't an option?

I only have experience doing development with OE, not OpenWRT, but to me it seems OE is sufficiently modularised to allow targeting routers as well, and OE coan definately benefit from the networking knowledge OpenWRT could bring.

win-win?

Rather misleading and unfortunate name.

Posted May 4, 2016 15:50 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (1 responses)

Is it just me that think it's weird to call something "The Linux Embedded Development Environment" when such industry wide initiative ( which is what the name implies ) consist solely of members from the openwrt community?

Rather misleading and unfortunate name.

Posted May 4, 2016 16:43 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I think the hope is that it will end up including many others.

We'll see how things end up working. There isn't much there, but if they can pull in patches submitted to openwrt better than openwrt, usage can shift (and/or OpenWRT can fix it's processes and the projects can merge again)

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 5, 2016 0:36 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (11 responses)

I did a bit of googling to try to figure out what the difference is between lede and openwrt, and found a long conversation hanging off the original message:

https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2016-Ma...

Which dozens of replies later culminated in a response using the Royal We from... I guess the old maintainer they were leaving behind? Not sure who this is, it claims to be written by committee (a "team"):

https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2016-Ma...

Except the one thing everybody seems to agree on is that the people who left represent the majority of the developers of the old project...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11624800
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11625207

Very confusing to outsiders...

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 5, 2016 15:54 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Looks like they just want a fresh start on creating a community. Something with a much more formal/organized structure.

I am a long time openwrt user, but never followed the project closely. I was just interested in using the software to improve my consumer routers.

I always been struck by how disjointed OpenWRT is, as far as the website/wiki/documentation goes. There is a hodge-podge of broken documentation, old and new wikis, scattered hardware documentation, hints, and howtos/guides of varying quality and age. Just trying to figure out what type of image to use was always difficult.

If this is a reflection on how OpenWRT is organized as a community then I can certainly see why they wanted to restructure.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 6, 2016 11:33 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

This explains the issues in a bit more detail [¹]

What will be interesting to see is how company that are sponsoring and thus provide financial support to the openwrt project will react due to the uncertainty of the future of that project.

I for one would hold of any further sponsorship/investment for a year or two to see if the uncertainty of the future of the project would get resolved and or to evaluate if investment in the "fork" would be better investment or look straight away into competing alternatives to openwrt and evaluate those.

It's also going to be interesting to see if the Purple foundation [2] will be sticking with openwrt or move to new LEDE initiative as well as whether CZ.NIC will be stop basing their project turis on openwrt and move and contribute to LEDE instead.

1. http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/lede-dev/2016-May/00...
2. https://prplfoundation.org/

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 6, 2016 18:22 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (8 responses)

So... what I've deduced from that thread is: OpenWRT has a chronic bikeshedding problem leading to glacial progress and failing infrastructure (symptoms I'm already aware of as an end user...), this split happened because some of the developers just want to get things done without dealing with the others they believe to be the source of that problem, and as soon as it was announced the ones left behind suddenly found enough motivation to start burning bridges?

People are already drawing comparisons to other forks but it sounds more like an XFree86/XOrg situation to me.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 8, 2016 6:52 UTC (Sun) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (7 responses)

> People are already drawing comparisons to other forks but it sounds more like an XFree86/XOrg situation to me.

Do wonder if XOrg is overdue for its own split...

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 8, 2016 15:46 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (6 responses)

> Do wonder if XOrg is overdue for its own split...

Split into what? It is a legacy system.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 10, 2016 21:33 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

It's the only system anyone *uses* so far (Wayland is getting there, but isn't there yet). Calling that "legacy" is about as believable as Microsoft calling DOS applications "legacy" was in 1990.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 10, 2016 21:39 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Nah. There is no feasibility of a fork for a project that doesn't have a future.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 11, 2016 22:24 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

X is going to exist for decades, and, y'know, Wayland is several years old at this point. Glamor came along for X.org's X server *after* Wayland got started, which suggests that this 'project that doesn't have a future' is in fact still seeing major enhancements.

Perhaps because it does have a future? I mean, yes, it'll probably be obsolete twenty years from now and more or less unused in fifty -- but so will everything we now use.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 11, 2016 22:53 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

X as a compatibility layer will have a future of course and shared enhancements but the context is forking Xorg. *That* has no future.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 18, 2016 22:39 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

You seem to be having trouble reading what I'm writing, which is e.g. noting that it's still seeing major development, so as such it seems to be doing perfectly all right and might indeed fork if several major developments conflict (though all seems very collegial there right now, so a fork seems quite unlikely).

It certainly doesn't appear impossible. It's still more active than Emacs development, for instance, even though Emacs is more alive than it has been for a very long time. Its biggest problem seems to be review bandwidth, which is hardly a sign of a dying project that has no future.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 18, 2016 23:20 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>It certainly doesn't appear impossible

This is where I disagree. I think a major fork is indeed impossible. We can check in, after a few years.

The Linux Embedded Development Environment launches

Posted May 6, 2016 11:56 UTC (Fri) by tlw (guest, #31237) [Link]

It would be wonderful if the people behind this community could take a look at OE and consider joining; there already exists a meta-openwrt (https://github.com/kraj/meta-openwrt) which is maintained by a prominent and active OE developer/contributor.

I've never been part of the OpenWRT community but, in my opinion, reading through the list of long-standing issues (as an outsider) it would appear many of those are addressed under OE (I'm not claiming they're solved under OE, but at least they're acknowledged and worked on):
- OE is very active with lots of contributors/maintainers
- infrastructure provided by several groups
- public meetings anyone is free to join
- many key people have commit access
- auto-building and auto-testing infrastructure plus manual testing of all major releases: https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Yocto_2.1_Overall_Test... and http://autobuilder.yoctoproject.org/
- lots of docs: https://www.yoctoproject.org/documentation

The Yocto Project (an umbrella project which includes OE) is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, its chief architect is a Linux Foundation fellow. It's backed and used by huge companies and hobbyists alike.

Is OE perfect? Certainly not, but there are lots of people working to improve it all the time. If the LEDE group has looked at OE and decided against joining I'd be quite interested in knowing why (as I'm sure others in the OE community would be as well).


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