On Wednesday 22 June 2011 01:16:20 David Miller wrote:
From: Sven Eckelmann sven@narfation.org Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:41:45 +0200
On Tuesday 21 June 2011 14:35:15 David Miller wrote:
All of this effort was placed to get this thing merged into the main tree, and then moved out of staging.
"Shooting the messenger" - I think that is the matching phrase. Just try to grep my name in the net/batman-adv/ and you will see it nowhere.
It is everywhere as far as I am concerned, because you're the only person actually keeping upstream maintained and in sync.
That is more related to the fact that Mareks opinion on the topic is that only one person should be in responsible for the linux merging and this position should not be changed each time. And I understood the names in MAINTAINERS as the persons which feel responsible and are the right ones to contact to get something done (whether it is merging, submitting bug reports, asking for information, ...).
The problem is that I am probably the most unimportant person in the whole project.
From my perspective, this is not true. You are the most important person. And this is because the people writing the code obviously don't care enough about upstream to do any merges themselves. Yet you do.
I think that I have to adjust your perspective slightly. I would never say that Marek doesn't care about something. Yes, he never did a pull request, but he always comes up and try to give further insight when it was needed. He is currently the mastermind behind batman-adv and tries to keep everything together.
He already wrote you that he is willing to take over and I will assist him as good as I can (but not doing pull request anymore or giving statements whether a patch is good or bad for batman-adv/linux)
Just to give you a small overview about the stuff where currently work is done (as far as I know). More or less the complete protocol should be rewritten and many features should be added. You already got the first step when you merged the translation table and roaming changes [1]. Other topics seem to be: * multicast[2] * splitting OGMs[3] in ELP[4], OGM and something else * Adding support for an ARP protocol over distributed hash tables[5] * wireless network coding[7] * ap isolation * mesh wide minstrel * transmission quality calculated using the data from the wifi drivers along the path * redundancy bonding * ...
Every change needs some modifications to the packet format and may make it incompatible to the previous versions (some only add flags and some need to modify many things and even add new packet types). They already started to discuss[8] how they want to send those changes to you.
thanks, Sven
[1] https://lists.open-mesh.org/pipermail/b.a.t.m.a.n/2011-June/005010.html [2] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/Multicast-ideas [3] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/OGM [4] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/ELP [5] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/DAT [6] http://www.open-mesh.org/wiki/batman-adv/MGO [7] http://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/misc/wbmv4-network_coding.avi (there is a document called "Inter-Flow Network Coding for Wireless Mesh Networks" about it, but I don't think that I am allowed to redistribute it) [8] https://lists.open-mesh.org/pipermail/b.a.t.m.a.n/2011-June/005025.html