The issues about OpenWrt are discussed on the forum and submitted on GitHub, but the ToH page doesn't say it the concrete device is supported by OpenWrt without any serious issues, such as kernel panic, driver crashes...
Is there any possibility to add a special column in a ToH spreadsheet that will say if current stable/snapshot (whatever) implementation has no known compatibility issues discoverable via Github (opened issues)?
Pros:
That will save time and focus the attention of potential users on 100% working solutions (sw version & hardware) when they plan to buy and use a device.
Cons:
That will reduce interest to non-fully supported devices (however only 5-20% of all OpenWrt users are kernel/driver programmers with effective appliable experience).
Possible impl:
by hand / searchable tags: COMPAT(CPU/WAN)CHIPNAME_(CRASH/PANIC)
I mean, the user who just plans to buy the device can't visit all pages of all devices just to find the proper variant for him. It is impossible in time.
You may not be able to visit all device pages, but you really should for the handful of devices that end up in your closer selection - before buying it. It's simply impossible to list everything in the overview, there are just too many potential and very diverse topics to cover. Take the https://openwrt.org/toh/bt/homehub_v5a as an example, it's a great device and fully supported by OpenWrt, …after you've managed to flash it from factory, which is not quite for the faint of heart. Furthermore lantiq as a whole is slightly marginal (~85 MBit/s without software-flowoffloading, up to maybe 120 MBit/s with it enabled; for the FXS enabled devices between 55-60 MBit/s) in terms of routing performance, how would you display that in the ToH tables?
Yes, you could add 'everything' to the ToH, in kind of a free-form (non-)structure, but… hey, we already have that, it's called device page. By its very nature the ToH can only provide a brief overview, for anything more verbose it simply doesn't fit that purpose - and non surprisingly, there have already been complaints about the ToH overview being to verbose, too wide already. You simply can't do it both ways.
What makes you believe that this information would magically appear in the ToH overview, if none of its users bothered to add that information to the device page? The wiki depends on everyone's contribution.
Given the status quo... probably the most viable solution to such issues is a per-device/per-user questionnaire... ( off wiki probably tucked into aparcars auto-sysupgrade site or similar )...
The metrics of which can be used to display "ratings" for the items you discussed ( not github issues tho' )...
Given the effort required to develop said systems... current user base numbers / skill-levels are questionable / borderline as to whether it would be worth the effort... If the community grows... and/or lowers it's target market ( not likely ), I totally agree with the need for this.
For "new users" such metrics are a godsend... what you need to remember though is;
The OS is not heavily orientated toward new users
Choosing a device is maybe 5% max of anything you'll ever need to do ( albeit important, and the forum does offer responsive answers to questions )
The other side to this is development quality. But, personally I would not like to see cut backs in this area, the more devices supported the better... quirks and all...
Summary;
ToH is not suited to this
Setup vs gain is limited mostly to new users and the forum offers an alternative
an easy link showing general information about the wifi driver and possible issues with it
-> already available in the dataentries (although the wifi driver pages are not really well filled with information, IMHO; needs someone actively filling it with information)
-> https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/driver.wlan/ath9k
an easy link to the forum, showing search results for your device
-> already available in the dataentries (although not yet shown in the datatables, which often still show a concrete forum link instead of the forum search link):
an easy link to bugs.openwrt.org, showing issues reported for your device
-> I could think of a similar solution like for the forum search link, ie. a data field in the dataentry that contains keywords for a search on bugs.openwrt.org, like so:
You can already see on these examples, that this datafield needs someone actively filling it with information (=keywords), since a simple pre-filling with the model name (TL-WR1043ND) will lead to incomplete results, due to users writing it in all kinds of variations (WR1043, 1043ND, TL-1043ND, wr1043nd-v1, TL-WR1043ND, ...)
What do you think, would a "Bugs search" link in the dataentries be helpfull?
