Has anyone attempted this? I'm curious about thoughts on this... It could be a solution to support a lot of new hardware and the latest kernels/packages without affecting the "stable" OpenWRT users.. As you know, Debian Unstable is a rolling release distro - so I wonder how hard it would be to "rebase" OpenWRT on Debian Stable.
depends on the size of the images, I'd say, openwrt uses "shrunk down" libs to be able to fit 8mb flash devices, something you'll probably not be able to do, with the standard libs Debian use.
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tl;dr a) no technical need, b) technical challenges that are significant, c) OpenWrt already shares many of the same ideals so nothing to gain there either
True enough. I mean OpenWrt did it The Right Way™ and primarily uses overlayfs which means practically any device with a USB port has unlimited space, but Debian is a wholly different kettle of fish.
I see this as a bit of a solution looking for a problem to solve. There isn't really an issue with latest kernels/packages affecting Stable, because that's exactly why we have the stable releases and snapshot (which is our equivalent to unstable).
Off the top of my head, hard. Very very very hard.
Debian doesn't share the same technical goals. Debian doesn't care about memory footprint or much about squeezing performance. And it has cross dependencies all over the place, tons of big huge ones, simply because it's easier than working around them and people who run it have the space. Just ripping out systemd is a major ordeal. So put in Luci on Debian and you'll end up with an entire LAMP stack on your device. Which, storage wise might not be an issue, but you'll exhaust your memory in a heartbeat.
In many ways I personally see OpenWrt as sort of the Debian of devices anyway. Philosophically It shares many of the same ideals: the same push for openness and freedom, the same willingness to go through pain to adopt new ways of doing things (but in a way that is measured and practical). And it shares, for the most part, the same sort of meritocracy about ideas.
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