[db90h]

UPDATE: I changed my feelings on this a bit since I wrote it. OpenWrt is now finally making some forward progress and I now see their goals a bit clearer (to be the definitive embedded linux base platform). That said, I still believe there is often unnecessary re-design, but I at least empathize with their position.

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Yes, I know this is DD-WRT's forum, but I have not the courage to post this on OpenWrt's, and I think these issues relate to DD-WRT, and specifically define why it stands a better chance of success than does OpenWrt Kamikaze.

OpenWrt White Russian is a wonderful thing, as stale is it may now be getting. It uses a well-documented common nvram interface and a great build system that makes extensions and modifications easy. It has a structured webif, though it's no longer being worked on because it wasn't good enough.

If design had frozen at White Russian, OpenWrt might be very far down the pipeline. It would have many needed updates and a large community of developers would be working on improving it, instead of deprecating it.

Instead, the developers have worked towards further perfecting the design, possibly to the point where it's so over-designed that it will never be completed or useful to much of anybody. White Russian may always be useful, but there is so much work left to be done for Kamikaze, and they keep changing the design (i.e. migration to buildroot_ng, abandonment of nvram based configuration).

After there is finally a stable release of kamikaze, if there ever is, will they stop there? Probably not. At what point does design get inpractical, unnecessary, and counter-productive?

The OpenWrt developers would respond that their technical audience appreciates all this design. I'm sure they do appreciate the good design of White Russian, but does anyone really need or want any more than this.. considering the overhead involved in getting such new designs rolled out the door?

DD-WRT is in stark contrast to OpenWrt, and look at how sucessful it is. I'd love to see it's build system more easily extensible, and perhaps I will work on this if Brainslayer lets me, but by not over-designing and re-engineering things to the point of absurdity, DD-WRT is taking care of business and making a difference.

Note: I'm a supporter of both projects, and of FreeWrt. These are just my observations of what current trends are.

[lawnmowerguy1]

db90h,
I agree with you on this, which is why I am working on this project.

BrainSlayer has given several of us writable SVN access, it seems you have a lot to offer. Has he granted you this access yet?

[db90h]

[sagichnicht04]

EDIT: N/A

[db90h]

sagichnicht04: Yep, that's my feelings. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed this. Bringing up such issues with the OpenWrt guys doesn't exactly make you feel loved ;p.

[db90h]

I changed my feelings on this a bit since I wrote it. OpenWrt is now finally making some forward progress and I now see their goals a bit clearer (to be the definitive embedded linux base platform).

[sagichnicht04]

EDIT: N/A

[nbd]

Hi there,

I know that this is not the OpenWrt forum, but I'd like to clear out some of the misconceptions about OpenWrt which seem to be prevalent here.

First of all: People comparing OpenWrt and DD-WRT often tend to view OpenWrt as just another end user firmware, which is simply wrong.

OpenWrt does not try to be a firmware that just crams more features into Broadcom based routers. If this was our goal, then our software would in fact be overengineered.
In fact we solve entirely different problems. We make it a lot easier to produce a firmware that works on lots of different hardware and is easy to port to many other devices, and we also want to build a reliable firmware and package base that saves you from writing the same things over and over again and constantly reinventing the wheel.

If you only focus on the regular end users, then you will see more of those in DD-WRT for sure. But we are quite successful with people that need to build their own customized firmware for things that are simply not covered by a regular router firmware with a pretty web interface.
Sure, it's possible to hack a few extra packages into DD-WRT and recompile the whole thing. Maybe change a few web pages as well. But what if you want to change the whole firmware system to make it usable for a completely different purpose that we didn't even think about? This would be a really tough job with DD-WRT, even if it had an easier build environment. And you'd be reinventing the wheel again, because a lot of the base system would become unusable for you in this case.

Secondly, regarding the comments about buildroot-ng: A lot of issues that we're fixing in this redesign were brought up by our users and were considered important to fix. So we did things like massively reducing the number of files you have to edit in order to add a package, automatically resolving dependencies and rebuilding packages that have changed and so on...
The feedback on buildroot-ng from users that were already using 'Kamikaze' was mostly very positive, especially from those that did lots of custom builds and large scale rollouts.

Another thing: While we are admittedly often too lazy to write good documentation (with a few exceptions of course, like this nice introduction to buildroot-ng: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=31794#p31794), we do put a lot of effort into separating all our changes into individual patchsets that can be reviewed and merged.
If you're a developer, then you can follow the progress of OpenWrt and its components with our Trac system (https://dev.openwrt.org) quite easily.

So to compare OpenWrt and DD-WRT in a different way:
- DD-WRT is mostly for end users only
- OpenWrt is aimed at developers, rather than people that don't know anything about Linux
- DD-WRT makes things easy for end users by giving them a nice web interface
- OpenWrt makes things easy for developers by giving them lots of patches and a nice, clean build environment.

Cheers,
- nbd (OpenWrt developer)

[BrainSlayer]

not just a nice web interface nbd, i'm not just developing html. this is the part where other people are helping me since i'm no stylesheet guru. but dd-wrt is more specialised in its features than openwrt. in openwrt its up to you to create the right firmware system. dd-wrt has almost everything inside you need as standard end user and more.
i'm also focused to change many standard linux packets to make them more end user friendly or just to fix bugs or doing enhancements. if someone tells me (and you should know it better) that dd-wrt is just a nice gui he is on the wrong path.

[nbd]

Yeah, i didn't mean that dd-wrt is just the web interface. I was just comparing the most important features of each...

[BrainSlayer]

just to clarify. nbd and me are knowing each other and we are in a good mood. he is helping me in many points like i'm helping him out with some others. so this here is no flaming discussion or something else