More over backfire is not an old release but the stable one, aka the one people should use...
2011/10/31 Marek Lindner lindner_marek@yahoo.de:
Hi,
After nico commit [0] batman-adv stopped working in openwrt backfire ( the crc16 modules is still kmod-crc16 in openwrt stable )
the batman-adv module refuse to load without error message on stdout but saying that crc16 is missing on dmesg
selecting manually kernel modules -> other modules -> kmod-crc16 it work again
[0] https://dev.openwrt.org/changeset/28657/packages/net/batman-adv/Makefile
the OpenWrt developers have renamed the package dependency. Unless you are using the OpenWrt trunk after revision 28656 the package dependency selection won't work anymore.
Maybe you should ask them about their concept of backward compatibility.
Cheers, Marek