Hi,
I’m Matthias (aka NeoRaider), and this year, I’ll participate in the Google Summer of Code for the Freifunk project.
The goal of my project is to develop an alternative to the UCI configuration system, as UCI has a number of issues that make it cumbersome to use in some situations.
One of the basic issues of UCI that affects many Freifunk (or generally community mesh) firmwares is the upgrade behaviour. Mesh firmwares usually contain elaborate default configurations, which set up network interfaces and other things to allow participating in a mesh without deep knowledge of the setup.
But this setup needs to change from time to time, as the firmware is upgraded. In the Gluon firmware framework, we usually solve this by providing upgrade scripts which modify the configuration after flashing the firmware. Writing these script is often a tedious task, and the scripts easily break when the configuration differs too much from the expected one.
But the ability to change the configuration is important for many Freifunk users: They want to change the role of ethernet ports, WLAN settings, and a lot more. But UCI doesn’t provide information how a setting was changed: if a script encounters an unexpected value, it can’t find out if it is an old default value, or was changed by the user. This often leads to a difficult choice for the script author: either to overwrite the value unconditionally, maybe disregarding voluntary configuration changes, or not to overwrite it, rendering communities unable to change certain configuration during upgrades.
My project aims at solving this by saving the user configuration independently of the defaults provided by packages. This way, a package upgrade can change the default values, but explicit user configuration will not be affected.
Another issue is that the upgrade scripts are usually part of the packages that bring the configuration. Removing a package will leave the configuration behind, which is usually a good thing (for users which know about this and may be interested in the the old config), but for mostly-automatic upgrades, old configuration may accumulate, which can quickly become problematic on devices with very limited flash.
I plan to fix this by basing the new configuration system on schema definitions, which specify which configuration options and values are valid. The schema will probably be based on JSON, as there are already lots of existing systems for defining JSON schemas, which may be used for my project or at least serve as inspiration. This will also finally provide real datatypes for the configuration and make things more consistent (finally no more 1/true/on/yes/0/false/off/no booleans!). If we want too keep the package/section/option organization of UCI, or rather allow defining schemas for any JSON structure, is still a subject of debate.
Instead of going into detail even more in this post, I’ll provide a link to my Gitlab project: https://gitlab.com/neoraider/ece
Design documents, examples for configuration and schemas, and first code will start to appear there very soon 