Hi,

in the last months many new branches were created and many numbers are floating around which caused much confusion. Here comes a brief summary why these branches and numbers were created, what they are good for and who is behind it:

Whenever we mention Roman numerals (as II or III) we speak of B.A.T.M.A.N.'s routing algorithm version. It describes how the routing information are flooded and how they are handled to make the best routing decission possible.

Arabic numerals are used to distinguish the version of our implementation. Next to the routing algorithm many features and goodies are added to simplify the users life.

Example: batman 0.2 uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. III routing algorithm.

=== batman-0.2 === [Maintainer: Marek Lindner, Axel Neumann]

- 0.2 stable was created last summer and represents our implementation of the BATMAN III routing algorithm. It works quite well and stable but has a major flaw while routing strong asymetric links. That is why we began working on a new algorithm - 0.2 is to be deprecated soon.

=== batman-0.3 === [Maintainer: Marek Lindner, Andreas Langer]

- The 0.3 branch brought a bunch of new features and updates to 0.2, especially a newly designed routing algorithm. It seems rather stable but needs some more testing before replacing the current stable version.

=== batman-experimental (aka bmx) === [Maintainer: Axel Neumann]

- This branch kept the 0.2 routing algorithm and tried to overcome its flaws by extending it. Despite its name it is neither specifically unstable nor contains the latest features for the 0.3 branch (we are not debian ;-) ). Under the hood it shares much code with 0.3 - not more or less.

=== batman-advanced (aka batman-adv aka batman-adv-userspace) === [Maintainer: Simon Wunderlich, Marek Lindner]

- In April 2007 batman advanced (residing in user space) came to light. It was a layer 2 implementation of batman 0.2. Since then it was continuously worked on and uses the batman 0.3 routing algorithm today. It builds a switch of all your nodes and enables you to ran any protocol (IPv4, IPv6, ..) on top of it.

=== batman-saxnet (merged back into batman-adv-userspace) === [Maintainer: www.saxnet.de]

- In autumn 2007 Saxnet (a German company) wanted to use our layer 2 implementation for their products. They tested, fixed and improved our layer 2 implementation. Therefore they got an extra branch which was merged back into our batman advanced userspace branch.

=== batman-adv-kernelland === [Maintainer: Marek Lindner]

- Due to the testing we realized that the layer 2 implementation in user space suffered from many performance problems. In late 2007 we ported our layer 2 implementation to kernel space in form of a kernel modul. At the moment it is heavily worked on and a release is to be expected in the coming weeks.

=== battools === [Maintainer: Andreas Langer]

- The battools are a set of debugging tools which work together with our layer 2 implementation (user space and kernel land). You can use them to debug the mesh which proved to be difficult without them.

Regards, Marek