Hi Oswald On 07.01.2017 19.04, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
the idea would be to simply dump the list of user-installed packages into a config file which is preserved by sysupgrade. now, firstboot would see that file and start opgk with it - that's usually going to just work, as the network configuration is preserved as well. on top of that, luci could offer a button in the software manager to manually trigger the process in case the fully automated restoration didn't work out.
1. This relies on all packages and kernel modules needed to connect to the internet being part of the image. Users using DHCP will be fine (PPPoE as well I think), but users that need e.g. L2TP support to connect to their ISP (common in certain countries) will need to build a custom image to add L2TP support. More specialised setups using mobile broadband or one of the many mesh network protocols may also need a custom image. If you need a custom image, you might as well put all your packages in it to save space.
2. If you do build a custom image without all your packages, packages you download from LEDE servers may be incompatible for various reasons - kernel version, library versions, compile-time defined options and so on.
scripts for doing just that have been posted years ago, so i'm wondering why such a mechanism wasn't integrated upstream. am i missing something, or did just nobody think it important enough to do?
As mentioned above, there are many kinds of internet connections where the default package selection won't provide internet access. Since you can't remove files/packages from SquashFS (in the image), the default packages should be limited to what is useful and necessary to almost everyone - otherwise everyone would have lots of useless packages in their image that take up valuable space (and devices with 4MB flash would be unsupported).
of course, this immediately prompts the next question: why doesn't luci's flash operations page have an auto-download option for the sysupgrade image? the locations of the package feeds are also inside the image, and automating the integrity check isn't rocket science, either.
There have been recent discussions about a web interface to the image builder, based on or similar to Meshkit by Freifunk [1]. LuCI/sysupgrade could add a feature to connect to this service, submit a list of installed packages and other needed information, and automatically download an image built with these packages.
[1] https://meshkit.freifunk.net/ Regards, /Magnus _______________________________________________ Lede-dev mailing list Lede-dev@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/lede-dev
