Hello,
sounds like you made some good experience with the batman-exp branch. Thats really cheering to hear. Just, let me add some words regarding your understanding of the different branches.
batman-exp has started as a branch to make batman more configurable - e.g give the user more control about the system integration and even twist the core routing algorithm. Of course more flexibility also tends to make things more complex. The majority of the developers did not wanted to have the bunch of optional configuration options in the standard batman branch, thats why these features were realized in a different branch.
Particularly its possibility to experiment with the core routing metrics has lead to the extension "-experimental". Unfortunately, this has caused some people to think that the maturity of batman-exp is less advanced than the standard branch. This is NOT the idea, nor is it the other way around. Just two different branches, supposed to coexist and enrich each other.
Of course such a biased opinion tends to hurt a bit, and for the release I am already considering to rename it to something like -x or -exp. So it may considered as batman experimental, expert, extremely professional, or what so ever. But anyway, its just a name.
Approximately since the release of batman-0.3-alpha we have started to develop some new mechanisms to make the core routing algorithm more aware of asymmetric links and other stuff. And we had two different ideas to achieve this. It turned out, that one approach was implemented in the standard branch and the other one in the exp branch.
I think that both approaches definitively have their charm and their shortcomings. And it requires the feedback of the users to further trigger the evolution of these approaches. I am very grateful for that and any other feedback, criticism, bug report, etc.
Regarding the versioning (0.3/0.4/apha/beta/rc1...). exp 0.3-alpha might be a bit conservative. However, there is a very small list of other features on my todo list which i would like to add before the code is freezed.
thanks, axel
On Mittwoch 21 November 2007, Predrag Balorda wrote:
I have been using the exp branch for over 2 weeks now and it is working nicely. OK my set-up is not huge, only 4 batman-enabled nodes with additional 6 repeaters as clients to batman nodes. Now I would like to know when will someone decide to kill off the 0.3 beta and continue with exp 0.3 as the only batman? Maybe it's time to name it batman 0.4 and get rid of the "experimental" designation altogether (you even got the official ports)?
I even believe exp can be now released as another stable version.
Best regards to everyone on the list,
Pele
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