OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: Lack of a User Frendly Upgrade Process

The content of this topic has been archived on 19 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

I write having become horrified by the lack of an upgrade process. Whilst there is the functionality to upgrade, there is certainly no process. Whilst some great work was done on a beautiful GUI that was clearly intended to be user friendly, one of the most basic things that any user would expect is a simple, pain free upgrade process.

Whilst it is true through adverse personal circumstances, that I am running a rather old version of OpenWRT now, what has become entirely obvious to me is that, regardless of whether I had updated more recently, I would have come up with issues explained to me on IRC as a change in schema leaving the import of backups at a high risk of bricking my router.

I have been told that I must manually re-install everything and manually add every setting for fear of bricking the router given that settings are not automatically converted to take into account developmental changes.

Seemingly, the ability to upgrade was an entire after-thought. For the amount of work that has been done on OpenWRT, whoever is responsible for upgrades has let the developers of other aspects of OpenWRT (or even themselves) down.

Somebody on IRC around a year and a half ago was kind enough to help me get my OpenWRT router up and running. He's not around anymore and I couldn't possibly remember everything that he did. I have over 30 port forwards alone.

That aside, even the most seasoned techie/engineer could not be expected to remember every piece of config and it is neither time efficient nor reasonable for one to have not forseen that there is an entire lack of any cohesive upgrade process when considering a router with such a competent GUI (suggesting user friendliness was high on the list of development priorities) in the first place. I have never come across any other software/firmware like this. Wow.

(Last edited by indieben on 6 Feb 2018, 15:16)

So this is based on "what you've been told"? I've been doing upgrades keeping configuration for over a decade. It's been over a year and a half since someone held your hand doing god knows what on your router, and you still didn't bother to go through the available documentation and forum posts on the subject? Wow smile

Thank you for your exceptionally helpful and supportive post, you must be one of the developers responsible for upgrading!

(Last edited by indieben on 6 Feb 2018, 15:12)

indieben wrote:

I have never come across any other software/firmware like this.

What other firmware are you comparing OpenWrt with?

indieben wrote:

Thank you for your exceptionally helpful and supportive post, you must be one of the developers responsible for upgrading!

Helpful with what? I don't see that you have asked any questions or asked for support in any way. Like I said, upgrading works great. You can upgrade through luci as well. So what's the problem, exactly? This is your first thread on this forum and you are attacking the developers again in your second post for some unknown reason based on your misunderstood conversation with some guy on IRC years ago?

I'm not a developer btw. I'm just a guy who tries to read documentation and try things out long before even considering attacking open source developers giving us a free product.

The discussion might have continued from here.