Re: [PATCH] MAINTAINERS: Remove Sven Eckelmann from BATMAN ADVANCED

On Wednesday 22 June 2011 01:16:20 David Miller wrote:

From: Sven Eckelmann <redacted>
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:41:45 +0200

quoted

On Tuesday 21 June 2011 14:35:15 David Miller wrote:

quoted

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, ...).

quoted

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