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?
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?
It seems like the biggest problem is the late feedback from David S. Miller, et al, about patches. Getting this feedback earlier in the life of a patchset would easy people lives.
Partly, David switches horses relative often. So an early feedback is not as valuable as it sounds.
O.K. I've not paid enough attention to his comments to know this.
For Marvell work, we post all our patches to the linux arm kernel list, where the ARM maintainers will see the patches. All patches go there, in all stages of their life, from early RFCs, to patches we want the upstream maintainers to take in a following pull request. Thus there is the possibility to get early feedback from the upstream maintainers and avoid most last minutes surprises.
So maybe it would be good to stop using BATMAN mailing list for patches and instead use netdev. Or at least CC: netdev.
I'll tried it in the netdev_alloc/standard interface patchset but I got only a surprised "where is the pull request?" reply.
Humm, interesting. Is that maybe because BATMAN only ever sends pull requests to the list?
Andrew