I think the question is, should the PRIMARY b-u distribution be geared
towards a floppy release, or something more modern. If people with
floppy only hardware want to maintain a stripped down floppy only
version, that's great, but do we really want the fate of B-U tied to
such limitations?
Frankly, I have a love hate relationship with B-U, and I think it's
destined to fail for more than a lack of a snazzy web interface. I'm
not trying to blame anyone, I'm just stating issues getting in the way
of B-U's usefullness for the general DIY router crowd. I've put up with
them because I've been a unix hacker and router hacker for over 15
years, but I still find them painful:
1) I was a core developer for FreeBSD for over six years. I've been
a Debian follower for about eight years as well. Both projects
lost major mindshare because their software was too difficult for
folks to install. As dedicated hackers, we looked at ourselves and
said: "WTF?" Then Mandrake and later Fedora came along and we saw
how installs should work. Even eye candy can be important. :-(
Installing B-U on modern hardware is still a pain requiring multiple
tools and sometimes multiple operating systems. Installing mono0wall
is as simple as running dd or pfwrite with a single binary. Until
you can make BU easy to install on something other than a box with a
floppy, you're cutting off most of your "try it and see" crowd.
2) It's insanely tedious to upgrade the software because the configs
are still stored with the binaries, and there are no tools for
merging diffs between the configs (e.g. ucf).
3) There's no easy way to figure out what modules should be updated.
Other developer rants:
4) The development environment is a mess. It needs to be portable and
self contained. People should be able to build a development
environment on any POSIX based system, even a cygwin environment.
(wishlist much much lower priority):
5) The way we use CVS is a mess. Because diffs are stored out of tree
in .tar.gz files and applied at build time, it's a pain in the ass
to see what work other people have done. Debian has this problem,
FreeBSD does not. CVS and SVN have branches, sources should be
tracked and imported.
These are all common problems in open software projects like this. Once
you climb over the hurdle of getting the damn thing working, you no
longer care about the install experience, but to gain additional workers
and reduce your support load, this needs to be done. In any commercial
endeavor (e.g. even Ubuntu and RedHat like commercializations of Linux),
initial user experience is the FIRST priority, not the last priority.
Am I volunteering to fix any of this? Nope, not anymore. I bought a
bunch of wrt54gl's and am using openwrt which provides similar
capabilities on less expensive hardware and there's a much larger active
developer base. That doesn't mean I don't like B-U and the team, I
think you guys are awesome.
Paul
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