Hello Andrew,
just a few comments:
On Wed, Dec 05, 2012 at 12:39:27PM +0100, Andrew Lunn wrote:
The biggest different is the "lets install a whole kernel to test this change" methodology ;)
Yes, i generally do that, test a whole kernel, not a module. But...
Usually (please correct me) batman-adv is developed outside the kernel because it is easier to test stuff and it worked till now. No one of us wants to port the latest OpenWrt to the -rc kernel to test stuff ;)
Do you actually need to port to OpenWrt?
Most people I know using batman-adv use either OpenWRT based routers, some others "normal" (or stripped down versions of) distributions like Debian. So yes, this is probably the biggest user base (from my point of view, at least, no surveys done yet).
How i work is build a kernel, with everything i need built in. No modules. Then tftpboot the kernel, and use the rootfs from the disk. Why not do the same with OpenWrt?
OpenWRT has many other non-batman-related patches (platform paches, wifi patches, ...), and upgrading the kernel is a major hassle - you'd need to adapt/port lots of these patches, and some of them are not as nice as we are used from our Linux git repos. :)
We try to keep repositories up to date for our OpenWRT users, but this shouldn't make us or them update the kernel all the time. BTW, OpenWRT also uses compat-wireless for wifi with custom patches, this is how they keep at the "bleeding edge". If we change to this style, we would probably have to follow the same pattern.
Cheers, Simon