Since last update I spent most of time on fully understanding current build system and nodewatcher internals.
Build system
During the time spent into looking how the whole system works I belive that I was able to figure out what every step and script does in the current build system.
During that I found a lot of relatively simple improvements that can really reduce custom stuff that we have. Most of it was added 3-5 years ago when OpenWrt wasnt really in the state it is now. Custom mirror for source was added,which is now useless as it was not updated and on some really old custom packages it is really slow. Also,building all packages that are added to the package list during build time is not really efficient as during its building OpenWrt default feeds are replaced with our custom package feeds.
This causes users to be stuck on really old and quite limited number of packages. This will be revorked to only replace the target feed as it contains all of the kernel mods that are tied to specific kernel version.
Other packages have no such requirments and versions in upstream can be used.
Also,wget was used during the build time to pull dependecies instead of curl which is recommended tool. Wget is fine for simple downloads but a lof of packages are pulled from behind CDNs and with lot of redirects from mirrors such as Sourcefourge,those curl can handle fine but wget cant.
I have started dropping unused and old packages as well as those that had custom patches that were upstreamed a long time ago.
Stuff like iwinfo from 2015 and old curl.
Also,I have started to move both the buildsystem docker image and runtime docker image from Ubuntu 14.04 to 18.04 Bionic.
This does not yet fully work as Imagebuilder does not detect GCC and Ncurses in the runtime image as working despite the fact that GCC works fine. This will be hard to diagnose,but I feel that it is quite simple.
Custom Wlan Slovenija packages are being prepared for upstreaming.
This is all for now,next two weeks should be bring solutions to most issues.
Robert Marko