It might be, but most people’s experience of mailing lists involves them getting their head blown off for daring to ask a question without three year’s solid experience in the area.
(I have no idea if OpenWRT in particular is like this, but there’s enough out there that people don’t make them their first port of call.)
OpenWRT has communication problems. Sometime ago I tried to report a bug in the build system. It took them about two weeks to recognize that there's indeed a problem and went over like this:
/me: Bug in the build system. This is how to reproduce.
/they: Bug in Linux kernel. Not our problem.
/they: Bug is closed, upstream issue.
/me: No, toolchain bug. Here is proof.
/they: need logs
/me: here's logs
/me: here's a clumsy fix
/they: that's so stupid
/they: and your linux installation is broken
/me: no it's not, see here, working as intended
/they: you don't understand cross-compiling
/me: look here, you are setting up the cross-compilation all wrong
/they: kernel bug, fixed upstream
/me: not that again
/me: here's build logs, cross-compilation issue
/they: you are stupid, your linux installation is broken
/me: linux installation is just fine, but you are relying on a debian-ism
/me: here's patch
/they: ok, send to mailing list for review
/they: IRC says patch stupid
/they: we've merged our patch
They really need to work on being not hostile and clannish. Never had any issue on other mailing lists, and those weren't the Kumbaya-required kind with a code of conduct.
I mirror your experience. People are hostile and always interpret in the worst possible way. It is very difficult to defuse a situation, it's like walking on eggshells while blindfolded with a heavy backpack. I don't like their community at all.
The persistent unwillingness to engage and the inclination to dismiss was remarkable. Rachelbythebay had something somewhere about patches kept private and not submitted because no one wants to put up with an unreasonable or arrogant maintainer. All her observations apply here. Who would put up with the concentrated obnoxiousness?
I keep wondering about alternatives to the gate keeper models of governance.
Maybe something like survival of the fittest (Darwinian). Each build attempt runs the gauntlet. Only variations which survive get promoted.
I recently learned about "Test Into Prod", a seemingly effective methodology for mitigating the PR-based workflow bottlenecks.
So sorry, but I can't quickly refind the conference talks. (New laptop doesn't have my old browser history.) The speaker had previously done a fashion startup. Glib? Gilb? Argh. Sorry.
I feel like the way to do this would be to have (1) digital repro format & (2) auto-exec of submitted issues to verify.
Then have the workflow look more like (1) anon q public submits repro file & issue description, (2) auto-test system runs and validates repro file, (3) issue auto-logged, (4) issue cannot be manually unlogged without fix (if upstream, move to side filter, pending upstream fix)
The human triage stage usually seems the most adversarial. So having an automated system take it to "Yup, this is a bug" would be a good start.
This happened to me, but with a different project.. laughed off the mailing list for a dumb patch only to be included in a near term update. I seriously walked away from large open source projects for almost 6 years because of this attitude.
I have ported three different devices to OpenWRT/LEDE over the years. In the first instance, it was pretty easy and they just accepted it.
In the second case they gave me the runaround and bullshitted until I just said I gave up. I used an alternate email address/alias to get it accepted. They took it with almost no changes just because they thought I was another person. They would have never accepted it had they known.
In the third case I was given a hard time again and just gave up, but never went back to get the device accepted and just don't care.
There are people like Kresin and Crispin and a few other toxic jerks who will fuck around with you for reasons I don't completely understand. There's a lot of smoke-filled-room bullshit that goes on in IRC channels that nobody ever gets to see in the OpenWRT community and so the decision making is super opaque and you have no idea what the real reason is they won't accept your patch while they pretend there's something else wrong with it on the mailing list (sudden onset application of policy that doesn't exist or they will just ask you to explain something begin and then pretend they don't understand).
It's not all bad over there. jow and Felix Fietkau are awesome, but they either don't have the power or don't care to make the org better.
The whole LEDE/OpenWRT fork thing will tell you a lot about the organization.
Oh yea, I almost forgot. How did OP here know about the new release of OpenWRT? They have no end-user mailing list. They don't have a twitter feed. They don't do facebook. They seem to hate their userbase because they have NO MECHANISM to alert end-users that there's a new release of the operating system. The update the wiki, maybe do a forum post if you are lucky, and that's it. Pure word-of-mouth.
>Oh yea, I almost forgot. How did OP here know about the new release of OpenWRT? They have no end-user mailing list. They don't have a twitter feed. They don't do facebook. They seem to hate their userbase because they have NO MECHANISM to alert end-users that there's a new release of the operating system. The update the wiki, maybe do a forum post if you are lucky, and that's it. Pure word-of-mouth.
dokuwikis RSS feed will list recent changes - and does as of writing not show the 19.07 release post. I'm not intimate with the feed.php if it can be used to list the frontpage with the exact post. I remember I searched for ways to know about new releases in the past and came out to list the top posts of r/openwrt now and then as the forum and openwrt-devel list are high-frequency.
This is not a complaint - the wiki is big, the lede/openwrt division very likely incurred a cost that the project still has to recover from. Actually a openwrt-announce mailinglist exists, but nothing is send there yet. "Announcements" has been one of the topics in a recent meeting - https://openwrt.org/meetings/20191121
RSS/Atom is alive and well, mainly because it's built into every CMS and blog engine by default, but requires some digging through the HEAD of a page to get it into a reader now that most browsers don't treat is as a first class format.
Yeah I blame the browser vendors, mainly Google and Mozilla. Enough resource to do shit like Webassembly, but apparently a XML format is too complex to integrate.
Perhaps dealing with flaky or inconsistent feeds was a problem? Particularly in a "why is your browser broken and unable to read this feed?" situation where it turns out the feed is a mess. If you don't support the feature, you don't get blamed for not handling all the weird edge cases.
I doubt that. HTML itself has the same problem. Browser vendors can't fathom the idea that content is not displayed on the website. Drive for centralisation, especially from Google.
Mozilla corporate BSed their way out of RSS. Their source for their claim that "nobody uses RSS" comes from their telemetry. Not one thought was given to the idea that maybe RSS users simply disable that more often?
At least dd-wrt was like that. No clue whether they are even still around and busy jerking each other off, but as a student I tried to get into porting it to another device that had a SoC that was already well supported. Made a very detailed post about what I discovered, researched, things I tried etc. Immediately got very snarky "rtfm"-like replies by regulars.
A couple more (less intense) experiences like this and bullshit reasons for refusing patches and nowadays whenever I improve or extend some open source stuff I just quietly do so in a fork on github and that's it. Maybe the original maintainers discover it one day. Also saves me the hassle of trying to adhere to any coding guidelines etc. for no reason.
> I just quietly do so in a fork on github and that's it
That is assuming they use GitHub or a moral equivalent and it isn’t instead buried in sourceforge or god help you some dusty SVN repo.
The nice thing about GitHub is it dramatically lowers the barriers to contributing to open source projects. I remember before pull requests you’d have to generate patches using arcane commands you’d copy and paste from some website. Then you’d email the diff to some mailing list and hope for the best.
Pull requests are perhaps the best thing that happened to open source.
Just trying to run it always had the potential of devolving into a nightmare of "read the forums to figure out precisely which numbered build by Brainslayer you need, but don't just go with the most current because a lot of them are broken in some way."
I think it might be you get your head blown, but only if you demand help and start denigrating a project because it should support this and that. I actually found very good behavior in mailing lists to very outright rude or careless questions. To the point that I think such question or remarks in real life would constitute very unnecessary behavior.
