Meeting notes - 10th December 2020 virtual meeting

Date: 10th December 2020

Participants: Adrian, pepe2k, richb, aparcar, chunkeey, lynxis, nbd, wigyori, stintel, Hauke, jow, Daniel, thess, Rafał, kaloz, blogic, ynezz

In Hamburg we decided to make releases more often (every 6 months), but nothing changed.
- currently blocked by DSA integration, kernel updates, https, ...
have snapshot releases in addition?
- Just cut master at a time
Kernel: Use the testing kernel feature to use the next LTS kernel
Keep master in usable state, including user space and Luci
- DSA was a problem
  - rampis was the first big target which got it with kernel 5.4
- add feature flags?
  - add global flag to activate all testing flags
  - Needs coordination
  - like the experimental flag in the kernel
  - two branches will probably not work because we do not have enough manpower
  - Daniel will implement this feature flag

signed sysupgrade images was added some years ago
secure master key and delegate keys to the builds
- key revocation is implemented
not activating by default for now, but sign it and allow to check if.
this would make it easier for vendors to use strong crypto in their system
For automatic update this would be needed
- we could also sign a file with the hashes of the images
do better security review of ucert, when we use it by default people will look closely at it
- canonical format is needed

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/3654 (3 ACKs, 1 NACK)
https://github.com/openwrt/luci/pull/4637/ (merged already)
- turn it off
- disabling this would violate the 802.11 standard on some targets where the drivers/firmware fail to adjust the rates that management and control frames are transmitted at to the minimum basic rate that is advertised in the beacon and probe response frames
  - works normally
  - should be added to the release notes and people can turn it on again.
enable ieee80211w by default after branching
John will push ieee80211ax changes after branching
ieee80211w could cause problems with very broken and/or old devices
- we plan to ignore this
- it should be very easy to disable these features to make old devices work

proposal to branch of beginning of Jan and get the features which are in and nothing more.
do not update the wifi driver for now keep them based on kernel 5.8 and do a minor update in March or so with an update to 5.10 based

19.07 EOL date extension, currently set to January 2021
- lets figure this out in the next few days and put it on the mailing list
- increase to August 2021 for now

Motivation for new rules...
keep voting on the list
- based on timezone it is hard for some people to join meeting
having a binding road map will probably not work
- OpenWrt is a hobby project for most of us and we would not commit to this
For the next meeting people should prepare how we can improve the meeting
put onto next meeting

if it breaks just revert it, but inform the person before
- it is not about the person, but about the code
It is much more important to keep master working

What? https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/3534
Keep devices/schema in main repo or have them separate (e.g. “devices.git”)?
- does not have to be manually copied to wiki when we have it in git and mandatory for adding a new device
- https://aparcar.github.io/devices/
- possible to combine this with board.d files later
- keep it in the main repo makes it easy to check if it is added in a commit which adds a new device

Create public “press” repo with logos etc?
A 2. version was posted in the forum
a conversion to over a longer time would be ok
SVG for the (new) OpenWrt logos: https://gist.github.com/jow-/503002651aa3ee3e8803b5ad29abf7ca

the only official one: https://twitter.com/lede_project (still “LEDE”, time for rebrand?), but:
- https://twitter.com/openwrt/
- https://hub.docker.com/u/openwrt
Is this handled by someone from the team? https://twitter.com/openwrtdevices
- AFAIK access by lynxis, Adrian, at least one other non-committer
The twitter owner does not answer we should involve SFC
- For docker it could also work this way
- John takes care of twitter

projected EOL for 19.07 currently January, extend to August for now ok?
- https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/security

In about one month, Paul takes care.

Next major release 20.12